Member Directory and Contact Form

PLEASE DO NOT USE THE SUPPORT FORUM FOR FEATURE REQUESTS!! This plugin has a lot of options and features, but I have been getting overwhelmed with feature requests recently. This plugin already does MUCH more than I originally intended, and more than we needed for our own school PTA web site. I have created some extensions that I thought would be helpful to the largest number of people, which you can find at: http://stephensherrardplugins.com PLEASE USE THE FEATURE REQUEST FORUM TO REQUEST NEW FEATURES!! http://stephensherrardplugins.com/support/forum/feature-requests/

Version 1.6.8 adds support for the Member Directory DataTables extension, which utilized the jQuery DataTables plugin to make your directory table searchable, sortable, paginated, and responsive. You can also select a jQuery UI theme and add custom CSS to further style the appearance of your directory.

A help tab has been added to the Member Directory admin section. Click on the Help tab in the upper right to show the help tab. There are sections covering each Member Directory admin screen, as well as how to set up shortcodes and custom links for both the directory and the contact form. I'm getting a Wordpress Mail Error when submitting the contact form, or emails are not getting delivered This is a server issue and has nothing to do with the contact form or this plugin. Version 1.2 added the Wordpress Mail Error message to let you know that the built-in Wordpress mailer (wp_mail) returned an error. This means that your server is not compatible with the built-in Wordpress mail function. You can use one of the many SMTP mail plugins, that change the Wordpress Mail function to use SMTP for sending emails. Since this plugin uses Wordpress Mail, any of those plugins that modify Wordpress Mail to use SMTP should work with this plugin to fix your mail errors. Note that some of those SMTP plugins will change the reply-to address to equal the from address instead of the address of the person filling out the contact form.

Place the shortcode [pta_member_directory] on the page where you want the directory. You can use shortcode arguments to specify a location or position. You can download a free extension to automatically generate the shortcodes for the directory and contact form, along with properly formatted arguments for location or position, from my plugins site at: http://stephensherrardplugins.com

If you want to use the contact form instead of displaying emails in the directory, make sure the "Use Contact Form?" option is checked. This will replace all email addresses in the directory with a "Send A Message" link. Clicking on that link will automatically generate the contact form on the same page, with the recipient already selected. However, you can also use the shortcode [pta_member_contact] to put the Contact Form on its own separate page. This will allow you to use the contact form independently of the directory. If you then select the page with your contact form on the options page, when you click on "Send A Message" in the directory, the link will take the user to the contact form page with the recipient field already selected. There is also a new shortcode to create a simple admin contact form without the recipient select box. Just use the shortcode [pta_admin_contact] . All messages sent from that form will go to the site\'s admin email. You can also force a simple admin contact form by passing in -1 as the id in a contact form link, such as: http://yoursite.com/your_contact_form/?id=-1 Additional shortcode arguments for the contact form have been added in version 1.5 to allow you to specify an ID for a specific member as well as to hide the recipient select box, so that you can hard-code contact forms for specific members. For example, if you enter content (such as bio) for a member and set the directory to link to member posts, you could embed a contact form shortcode for each member on their own post so visitors can contact them directly from the bio pages without having to select a recipient. Simplify the shortcode generation by downloading the free extension, PTA Shortcodes, from my plugin site at: http://stephensherrardplugins.com

At this time there are no built-in options for adding additional fields to the contact form. However, there is a Gravity Forms extension available which will allow you to create your own contact form with the very powerful Gravity Forms. The extension will prepopulate a recipient select box in your Gravity Forms from existing members and positions, pre-select one of those recipients based on links/arguments passed to it, and will alter the notification email to address to make sure the message gets sent to the correct recipient. The Gravity Forms extension is available at: https://stephensherrardplugins.com

I'm not a fan of captcha as I often can't even read them myself, and it makes setup a bit more complicated since you need to obtain and enter a key for a captcha service. Instead, I used the honeypot method of spam protection. There is a hidden spambot field that normal visitors won't see, but spambots will fill in. Any form submission that has that spambot field filled in will be rejected.

As of version 1.3.6 a filter hook has been added for almost all text that is output to the public side of the member directory and contact form. There is some information in the help tab in the admin section on how to use this, and there are now 2 files in the main directory of this plugin, output-filters.php and output-filters.txt, that provide all the information and sample code needed to modify any of the text strings. If you are not comfortable with PHP or adding code to your theme\'s functions.php file, there is a very simple Customizer add-on extension plug-in available at https://stephensherrardplugins.com

Just create a link to your contact form page (the page with the [pta_member_contact] shortcode), and include an argument for the id of the individual or group you want to be pre-selected on the contact form. For example, to link to an individual number, you set the id equal to the member directory ID of the member, which you can see in your list of all members. If the ID is 101, then your link should look like: http://yoursite.com/your_contact_form/?id=101 If you want to select a position to contact all members who hold that position, use the slug version of the position. You can see the slug for each position from the list of Positions on the admin side. For example, if you want the contact form to be pre-selected for the position of President (slug would be simply president), your link would look like: http://yoursite.com/your_contact_form/?id=president

If you want a directory for a specific location on its own page, add the location argument to the directory shortcode, and use the slug version of the location you want to show. For example: [pta_member_directory location="seattle"] If you want a single directory page that you can use to show all locations, but also can show a specific location, use the regular directory shortcode without the location argument. If someone goes directly to that page, they will see the full directory for all locations. But, if you set up links to that page with location arguments in the URLs, you can show a specific location. You could, for example, set up navigation menu items for each location, all going to the same directory page, but with different location argument. For example, if you want to show a directory for Seattle, the link would be something like: http://yoursite.com/your_directory_page/?location=seattle