UC People

UC People is a plugin developed by the ITS Web Development team. It registers a custom post type of People that appears in the left navigation of the WordPress dashboard.

(See all Aurora WordPress Training).

In combination with new page templates available to Cornerstone-based themes, this plugin provides an easy way to organize and display people.

Creating People

To create a person, on the left side navigation on your dashboard go to People > New Person. All fields other than the person's name are optional.

If you have a large number of people to enter or update, you can also perform an import of users to UC People.

Groups and Tags

People can be organized in two ways, with groups and tags.  These can be managed in the dashboard by selecting People and then choosing either the “Groups” or “Tags” options.

Groups
Groups act much like post categories and can be nested hierarchically. For example, a group might be "Faculty" with nested subgroups of "Adjunct" and "Associate." Groups are useful when creating a page of people as one feature there is to show people separated by their group assignments.

Tags
Tags are just like the tags used by blog posts. They can also be used to organize people, but do not have the option of being hierarchically nested. For example, a single person might be tagged with "Molecular Modeling," "Nanotechnology," and "Polymers." Later, it would then be possible to display all people on the site with the tag "Polymers."

Creating a “People Page”

One of the features of UC People is a new page template that becomes available. This page template has a lot of great tools to help filter and sort which people you want to display.

To begin, start by creating a new page. On the right, in a box labeled “Page Attributes,” set the Template option to "People." You will notice that below the normal visual editor area for content, there will be a number of new form controls in a box labeled “People Page.”

Layout
This controls the layout of how the people will be displayed. The Grid option makes a grid of people, with multiple people for each row. This is a great option if you have a lot of images, and want to focus on those.

The Table option has only one person per row but has a lot more room for details like phone numbers or email addresses. This is a great option if you have no images or want to focus the page more on being a resource to contact people.

Specific People
By default, a people page displays all people on the site. You can see them listed in the left column of this section. However, if you only want to display the information of a few people, you can click on those people in the left column, and they will appear in the right column. Then, the page will only display the people in the right column.

This collection of people can then be further filtered down by the Specific Groups and Specific Tags options.

To return a page to display all people, delete all the people in the right column.

Specific Groups & Tags

Choose one or more groups, and only people that belong to the selected group OR any other selected group will appear. This allows you to create one people page for faculty, and another for staff, for example.

Choose one or more tags, and only people that belong to the selected tag OR to any of the other selected tags will appear. This allows you to create a people page of only the people tagged with "Chemistry" for example.

If both Specific Groups and Specific Tags are in use, only people that belong to one of the groups AND have one of the specific tags will appear.

Break Into Groups
When selected, this option will display people broken out into groups ordered alphabetically on the group name. For instance, you could select "Chemistry" as the tag, enable this option, and then the people page would display a list for "Adjunct Faculty” and another for "Associate Faculty."

Information to Display
On each People page, you can choose just how much information you wish to display. Any fields left unchecked will simply be left out.

Viewing a Single Person

Once a person has been published, they are available to be linked to through menus, manual links, or a People Page.

In the Menus section, you will see a new box appear along site pages called “People.” You need to select this box and then add people into navigation menus the same way you would pages.

Ordering People

By default, people will be ordered alphabetically by last name.

This default ordering can be manipulated by altering the Order attribute of each person.

Open

For example, if Abdul, Bogdan, and Carol are all set at order 0, they appear in alphabetical order by last name.

• Carol Gordon

• Abdul Kazeem

• Bogdan Stanek

What is really happening behind the scenes is more like this:

1. Order=0

   1. Carol Gordon

   2. Abdul Kazeem

   3. Bogdan Stanek

2. Order=1

   1. None.

If Bogdan's order number changes to "1," then the list will display all of the 0s and then all of the 1s, each in alphabetical order.

1. Carol Gordon [0]

2. Abdul Kazeem [0]

3. Bogdan Stanek [1]

If we then change Abdul to a "1", we get this...

1. Carol Gordon [0]

2. Abdul Kazeem [1]

3. Bogdan Stanek [1]

Using this field, it is possible to alter the default ordering of people in lists.

It is important to note that altering the order for a person will affect the order in which they are displayed in any list. If you're using more than one People page, this might be an issue.

Adding the Ability to Filter People

Any page that uses the People Template will have the option for filtering.

1. Check the box "Adds search bar and drop downs for filtering people."

2. Click Update.

When you view the page, you will see the following Filter. 

Filtering options are:

• Group/Tag

• Dynamic name search

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