CALS Resource Directory

Our Resource Directory plugin allows you to store, categorize, and display your content in a way that you choose. Users can easily search through your content based on the tags and categories you set up. You can control how your content is displayed and what search options are available to the user. This CALS Documentation Library uses the CALS Resource Directory to make it easy for you to find our resources.

Use Cases

There are many use cases for this plugin, and it is designed to be very flexible. If you don’t see your use case, please still feel free to reach out and we’ll let you know if we thing this plugin is a good fit for you.

• Documentation
  Easily organize and display documents on your page. Users can quickly search, filter, and sort your content to find what they are looking for.
  See our documentation library for an example.
• Learning Resources
  Display and organize learning resources for quick and easy searchability.
• Documents Library
  Easily sort and organize various documents in your library so users can search through and find what they need.

Getting Started

To request this plugin to be enabled on your site, please contact us and let us know what content you need organized and displayed on your page. We’ll enable the plugin and register a new post type for your resource.

If you already have this plugin enabled but would like to use it for an additional post type, please contact us and we can configure another post type for you. To prevent misuse of the plugin, the ability to create post types is reserved for CALS Web Services administrators.

To add, edit, and configure posts in your resource, find the resource you would like to edit in the admin sidebar. For our example, we are going to create a post type called “pet.” We’re going to find “Pets” and click to open the submenu and all of the options. Here, we can choose from the following:

• All Pets
  View all of the pets you have added into your directory.
• Add New Pet
  Click this to create a new pet post.
• Pet Categories
  Categorize your pets into broad topics. Typically each post will only have one or two categories. Categories can also have hierarchies so you might have a top level category for “Species” and a lower level category for “Breed.” Categories will be displayed with a higher emphasis than tags.
• Pet Tags
  Tags are used to describe content in more detail or further categorize your resource. For example, we might have “Affectionate” or “House-Trained” as tags. Tags will be displayed with lower emphasis than categories.
• Pet Settings
  Settings is where you will configure how the pets archives, pet category archives, and pet posts will be displayed. There are many options to customize the appearance and functionality.

Settings

To configure the settings for your resource, choose “Pet Settings“

Labels

• Post Type (pet)
  This is the post type you are editing. It cannot be changed because it is the identifier for all of the posts with this post type.
• Plural (Pets)
  The plural label for your resource. This is how it will display in the backend and the frontend. For example, a label defining all of your resource would be “All Pets” and text saying none were found would be “No Pets Found.”
• Single (Pet)
  The singular label for your resource.
• Slug (pets)
  The slug is the url that the archive page will be found at. For example, “example.wisc.edu/pets“
• Icon (pets)
  The icon that will show in the backend for your site in the admin sidebar. The icon list is pretty limited, but you can find one at WordPress Dashicons. When you find an icon, copy and paste the icon slug, ommitting the “dashicons-” prefix. For example: “dashicons-category” becomes “category.”
  If you put in an invalid icon, no icon will show. This will not break your site, but it might look a little strange. The default is “category.”

Archive/Search Page

• Archive Layout
  This is how your search, categories, and tags will show on the archive page. The archive page is the page that displays all of your posts, as well as search results when the user makes a search.
  • Center – This will display the heading, search bar, and filters centered on the top of the page. This option is best if you only have a few categories/tags to display and you want the search bar to be the most prominent.
    
  • Sidebar – This will display the search bar and filters in the left sidebar and the heading and posts on the front. This option is best if you have a lot of categories/tags and want users to be able to easily add lots of filters to find what they are looking for.
    
• Posts Layout
  • Grid – display posts in a 3 column grid and images on top (if enabled)
  • List – display posts in single column and images on the left (if enabled)
  • Compact – display posts in a single column with a smaller image (if enabled) and generally more compact layout
• Number of Posts
  The number of posts that will be displayed by default on the archive page. If you are using dynamic loading, this setting will be ignored.
• Show Tag Filters
  Whether you’d like users to be able to filter your posts by tag on the archive page.
• Show Categories As
  • Filters – available in the sidebar layout. Users can filter your posts by category. For example, they could select “German Shepherd” and “Labrador Retriever” and they would see any posts that are categorized as either “German Shepherd” or “Labrador Retriever”
  • Buttons – available in either layout. Users can jump to the archive page for any category (i.e. see all posts with category “German Shepherd”, but cannot filter by category.
  • Don’t Show – hide categories from archive layout
• Sort Posts
  Determines which posts will appear first on the archive page.
• Sort Categories and Tags
  Determines which categories and tags will appear first in the filters on the archive page.
• Load Posts Dynamically
  Filter posts as filters and search are applied instead of on page refresh.
  NOTE: if you have a large number of posts (like over 100), this will not be a very performant option.

Cards

This section allows you to show/hide elements in each preview card that appears on the archive page.

Post

• Post/Category/Tag Layout
  This controls the layout of how post content will show up. For example, if I click on my pet named “Max” I’ll see the single post layout. This layout will also be used for category/tag archives. When a user clicks the link to a category or tag, they will see a list of all pets that match that have that tag or category.
  • Sidebar
    Your content will appear on the right while a sidebar menu and search (if enabled) appears on the left. You will get to control which links and posts appear in the sidebar menu by editing the menu in Appearance > Menus. This layout is best when you want a user to easily navigate between posts on your site. For example, this is the layout we use for our CALS documentation and the page you are currently on.
  • Page
    Your content will appear as a default page, with search on top (if enabled). This layout is best when you want your content to stand out and users will generally only visit one post in a session.
• Show Search
  Shows a search bar on the page for your post type.
• Show Table of Contents
  Generates a table of contents at the top of the post’s page based on the headings (h2 and h3) on your post. Scroll to the top of this page to see an example.
• Show Published Date
  Show/hide the date the post was most recently published or updated.