Using the Staff Group

[Rashel Feldman]

Dear Bill –

I’m using Umami for my little school and for the first time am trying to use the Staff feature. I’ve set up two staff groups – Admin and Teachers – with the idea that I would separate my staff bios accordingly. If you would take a look at the Faculty and Staff page (found under the Student menu item) you will find my latest attempt at that. This is driving me nuts because I used the menu feature so successfully on a recent restaurant site and thought that it would work the same.

What have I done wrong? Thanks for your help.

Rashel

[Bill Robbins]

Hi Rashel,

Good question. The staff page does not split out the members into staff groups like the food section does. The staff page template is really intended for sites that just need a simple list of staff.

You can add the staff groups directly to your navigation menu and skip using a page. That will create a “page” (really a dynamic archive) for each group and keep them separate.

Take care,
Bill

[Rashel Feldman]

Ok. I have resolved those issues but now three new problems have crept in:

1. The page title it Archives. Is there some way for me to change it to Our Faculty & Staff?

2. I input all of these in alphabetical order and they have now taken on a life of their own. I would prefer alpha order.

3. After each person’s name and class, the date that I entered in the info and my user name appears. I would like to hide those. Please tell me I can…

Thanks,

Rashel

[Bill Robbins]

That’s definitely not what we’re going for there. The staff section is rarely used in Umami and apparently staff groups even less so. What you’re seeing there is the default archive template which is made for posts instead of the staff.

I just pushed out an update that should have the staff groups looking like the staff page template. It should show up in your dashboard update section soon. See if that won’t fix for you.

The staff are ordered by the “order number.” I would suggest using the simple page ordering plugin to drag and drop the staff into the order you’d like to have them. You can arrange them in alphabetical order so that they’ll appear that way on the front of your site.

Let me know how that goes,
Bill

[Rashel Feldman]

Bill –

Update received and loaded. It is much better. One minor problem and one last question. (And I recognize that we are both in uncharted water here!)

Problem: The staff defaults to using the Featured Image. If I could use a media file for each teachers picture, they wouldn’t appear so oversized.

Question: I would like to include each teacher’s e-mail address as part of their post. This would be easy if I could set up a link. You have been so helpful, since I cannot direct people to click on their picture, is the best way to do this to create a hot link in the text that they write. Something like, “To contact me via email, click here.”

Thank you so much,

Rashel

[Rashel Feldman]

Bill –

I spoke too soon on the update. You must have set a length on the descriptions that the teachers wrote. I have now lost more than half of many of their bios. I hate to keep asking you to fine tune this just for me. I wonder if I would be better off using a different template. Your thoughts.

Rashel

[Bill Robbins]

Rashel,

The staff page template and the staff group archives both use WordPress’ excerpt function to display up to 55 words of the content. If you’d like to have more visible, you can do one of two things. You can place the full content of their bios in the excerpt box when you’re editing them. That will keep any of it from being cut off.

Another option is to use one of the many plugins to change the excerpt function. They can let you adjust how much is shown as well as any tags that are stripped out. By default the excerpt only shows text, but you can cause it to include images, links and so on with some of these plugins.

I’m not really certain what you’re wanting to do with the staff person’s image. The featured image will show up like the attached screenshots from the demo. Are you trying to do something different there?

You’re best bet for the email is just add text to the bio that links to their email address. The social media profiles all end up inside icons. I try to avoid that for email addresses since a good many users either don’t have a default email app set up on their systems or are using a system at work or school that isn’t “theirs.” To me, email addresses work best when they can be read or just through a contact form.

Take care,
Bill

Attachments:

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[Rashel Feldman]

Dear Bill –

It is the end of a long day for both of us. I am delighted to learn about the Excerpt function. I think that this will work fine.

As to the photos, my only desire is to have them display without looking oversized. I’ve attached a file that shows both the media and featured image. See how much bigger the featured image is?

Have a good night!

Rashel

[Bill Robbins]

I completely understand long days, especially Mondays.

Are you adding an image of the staff member as a background image? I would suggest not doing that, especially if it’s the same as the featured image. Just use a reasonably sized featured image for their headshot. The recommended size is 300px wide by 400px tall.

I believe in the demo, my staff pages go with the default background that is set in the theme options. For most sites I think that’s generally the best way to go.

The attached image didn’t make it through. If they happen to be larger than 1mb in size or something other than a PNG or JPEG they won’t upload. If that’s not what you’re talking about, just let me know.

Have a great night,
Bill

[Rashel Feldman]

I’m not trying anything fancy. Heaven knows that I’m too tired for that at this point!

My original image size is 172 x 228 and it looked great. I have attached a file for you to see. It is a .png so I’m hopeful that you will get it.

Rashel

[Bill Robbins]

This reply has been marked as private.

[Bill Robbins]

Thanks for sending that over. It looks like the staff person’s image is being set as the featured image and being inserted into the content of their bio. You’re welcome to only insert it into the content of the staff member.

If you’d rather just resize the featured image a bit smaller, that can be done as well. This is how to do that:

1. Go to your theme options page and choose the Advanced tab.
2. Scroll down to the Custom CSS box and add this:

   
   .staff-image-details {
   	width: 30%;
   }
   

3. Update your settings.

The default width is 40% so this will make it smaller for you. You can adjust the 30% in the snippet above to find the right fit.

If you do make it much smaller, you’ll likely want to skip the social links since they appear on top of the image. We want to make sure the staff member’s picture can still be seen.

If you have something else in mind, let me know.

Bill

[Rashel Feldman]

Dear Bill –

I got it to work with your help…as usual. Thank you so much for hanging in there with me.

Rashel

[Bill Robbins]

Glad to hear you got it to work.

Have a great day Rashel 🙂

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