Display Members by a Third Criterion

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    • #9386
      Jan Miele
      Participant

      Working on a site that wants to display team members in their organization, selectable by THREE different criteria:
      — By Location (you cover this!)
      — By Category (Management, Consultants, etc… for which we can use your “Position” data)
      BUT ALSO —
      — By Product that the team member supports, like “software product 1, software product 2, etc.” because different clients use different software and might want to find the right team member to contact in order to help them with their product, training, etc.

      Found this PTA Directory extension – the DataTables Extension…
      https://stephensherrardplugins.com/plugins/pta-member-directory-datatables/

      Could we deploy this and use an argument to pass our “axis-z” parameter (by Product) to do “live search filtering” under wraps and then simply present the results on a page?

      To make this work, might we need also to install the Custom Fields Extension (see below) in order to create an additional field that we might cause a table created by the above to contain, and hence search upon?
      https://stephensherrardplugins.com/plugins/pta-member-directory-custom-fields/

      If any of this looks like it might open the door to a presentation that could sort by our additional axis of “Our Team By Product” ? One that you could possibly help us leverage for this project?

    • #9392
      Stephen Sherrard
      Keymaster

      Hi Jan,

      The Custom Fields extension could certainly be used to add the product field. The DataTables extension will do live search of all fields, but there is currently nothing included to let you specify a search phrase ahead of time… plus, it will search all the fields that are displayed to try to find matching text. Each column is also sortable, though, so you could quickly sort the results by the “product” field.

      Are you wanting it so that the visitor to the site chooses one of those three things to show the directory? Or, are you trying to set up pages that are already pre-filtered for each possible value of those criteria?

      Either way, it sounds like you would need a bit of custom programming to do what you are wanting to do. Position and Location are actually stored as “categories” or taxonomies for the “member” custom post type, while everything else is saved as custom postmeta fields. So, the way you would search/filter for position & location are different than how you would do it for any custom fields you would add view the custom fields extension.

      If you want to contact me privately, we can go over this in much more detail, and then I can give you an idea of what it might cost to custom program something for you.

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