CALS People Directory

Our People Directory plugin allows for the flexible management of biographical/contact information. It has an associate Directory display Gutenberg block that provides flexible display options on your website. Site visitors can easily search or filter your directory of people based on the groups/categories that you define. You can control how the people directory is displayed and what search and filter options are available to site visitors. The plugin also provides a details view for each entry with a standard set of biographical information and the ability to create custom information entries.

Use Cases & Examples

This plugin is helpful in managing lots of people information, and with the associated display block, can allow a site manager to have one source of people information and display the same information in different ways across different pages on your website. If your not sure if the plugin will fit your use case, please reach out and we’ll let you know if we think this plugin is a good fit for you, or we can advise on other options.

• Website Examples
  Easily organize and display people information across various units and pages using the Directory Gutenberg block’s flexible display options. Users can quickly search, filter, and sort to find who they are looking for. Below are a few different examples of the display options in use.
  • CALS Admin Website: Full directory page with filtering
  • CALS Admin Website: List view display of specific department/unit
  • Department Website: Grid view display option with filtering. Also using categories to allow for directory listings on pages by category.

Getting Started

To request this plugin to be enabled on your site, please contact us and we can active the plugin, and also provide you with a quick demo if you would like.

Managing People Information

Add / Edit People

Click the “Add New Person” button to create a new entry or hover your mouse over an existing entry and click “Edit” below the name to edit the entry for that person.

There are a number of directory fields available to be filled out. Most fields are optional, and information for that field will only be displayed if there is data in that field.

Creating and Organizing Groups

You have the option to use the Group taxonomy to tag your people entries to further organize people into groups. This is not required, but if you have lots of groups of people in your directory (i.e., faculty, staff, graduate students, emeriti, etc.) then this can be helpful in managing, finding, filtering the directory.

Here are some additional WordPress instructions for creating categories/taxonomies: https://wordpress.org/documentation/article/posts-categories-screen/

Directory Block for Displaying People Information

In order to display the people you have entered in the back-end use the Directory block by inserting it into a page and then configured the settings for how you want your people displayed.

The plugin uses the Directory block to display the people entries, and provides a range of flexible display options from grid view, to list view, with our without photos. You can also turn filtering and directory search on or off. The block be placed on any page(s) where you need to display all, or just a subset of the people added to your Directory Plugin.

Known Issues

Server security firewall triggered with some formatted content

Although the tabbed content section provides a basic rich text editing toolbar, it is best to limit extra formatting as much as possible because certain formatting/content combinations can trigger false warnings from the server security firewall when trying to save your content.

Observed issue: When trying to save the page, if you receive an error message similar to the those shown below, then it is likely that some extra formatting you have in one of your tabs is triggering a server security firewall rule.

How to fix the issue so I can save my updates: You will need to strip out unnecessary code/tags, and or remove the formatting/content that is causing error in order to save your content changes. This can be trial and error to determine the particular formatting/content that is causing the issue, but typically the main culprits are 1) combinations of special characters (ex., @!#$%()[]{}^<>&*), 2) html, xml or inline css code from other applications, 3) sometimes embedded images. This is the only work-around to solve the issue in order to maintain proper security we cannot add exceptions to the firewall security rules.

Also, if you have copy+pasted your content directly from an MS Word document or other rich text application, this might also have copied over some additional HTML, XML, or CSS code and formatting that is triggering the server security firewall rules. You can look at the “Text” tab to see if there is added/inline code or tags getting added to your pasted content that might be causing your issue.