Categories

RE: I need to post officers at the top of the directory, followed by everyone else. I’ve created categories and nested them in the order in which they should be seen, but it’s still alphabetizing everyone instead. Can you please help?

Categorizing entries does not change their order, and they can not be ordered by category. The Connections Categories work pretty much like WordPress Post Categories. So if you are familiar with WordPress Post categories, the same sort of rules and usages apply when using Connections Entry Categories.

Categories have their place, but I do not think they are the solution you seek.

You want to order the display order of the entries. As you see, the default is alphabetical by the last name, first name.

Connections allows you to define ordering by alternate fields:

• https://connections-pro.com/documentation/shortcodes/connections/#order_by

Perhaps ordering by either title, department, or organization will achieve the results you require.

Example, ordering by title:

[connections order_by='title']

If ordering by a different field will not work for your needs. Perhaps the Custom Entry Order addon will:

• https://connections-pro.com/add-on/custom-entry-order/

With this, you could set the “post officers” order to 1. That would push them to the top of the list. Or you could use numbers to have “post officers” in a specific order.

RE: I would also like to hide the name of the category. Is that possible?

Assuming you are using the Default Card template…

Please navigate to the Connections Templates admin page and click the Customize button for the Default Card template.

The page will refresh, displaying the Customizer on the left and a preview on the right. Note, you must have the directory homepage set.

In the Customizer, disable the Category option.

Click an Entry name in the preview; any entry name will do as it does not matter which. The preview will update, displaying the entry detail/profile view.

Disable the Category option again.

This needs to be completed twice because each template view can be customized independently.

Publish the change and exit the Customizer.

I hope this helps!

RE: should my first entry begin at 0 or 1? and can I utilize the order by title option after those numbered officers?

I would not use 0. As for the starting number. That depends on the directory size and how often you may need to adjust or insert others into a specific position.

I always leave “space”. Example. If I want an entry to be first, I will set it to 100 and then the second entry to 200. This allows a lot of room to insert new entries between those positions without having to edit all surrounding entries. I started with 1000 on larger directories and iterated from there.

RE: can I utilize the order by title option after those numbered officers?

Yes, you could. If you decide to, I suggest this order:

[connections order_by='title,last_name,first_name']

The resulting order will be those with a defined order set with Custom Entry Order, then title, then last name (within title), then first name (within last name). Basically, this provides “fallbacks” so the entries that do not have a title will display in an order that makes sense; otherwise, it’ll just appear random o the user (it’ll like to be ordered by the database by the order they were entered into the directory).

I hope this helps, please let me know.