Site Directories and Member Profiles: A Custom Post Type Story

Undergraduates. Graduates. Post-docs. Researchers. Staff. Investigators, both principle and otherwise. Faculty. Just about every site that one works with in Higher Education has lists and lists of people. A WordPress Page can be used to present this information, but keeping them organized on that Page — especially for larger directories and when each person within a directory has their own member profile — is a daunting task. The solution: a custom post type. Come hear about how David Dashifen Kees developed a Site Directory and Profile plugin for use on the University of Illinois’s WordPress Network, Publish.illinois.edu, and how it — along with carefully crafted filters, templates, and CSS — has provided the means by which campus sites present lists of people for going on three years now. And, he’s recently enhanced the plugin to make use of on-campus APIs to load site member information from data sources other than the site’s database providing more flexibility and interoperability throughout the campus.

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