Staff Page

[Nick Statt]

Hey Bill,

I saw the previous thread concerning the staff page and how to change the name of it and all that. But I’m having trouble just getting the staff page implemented on my site, in my menu bar, to even see if the changes I’m making to the page (name, thumbnail size, etc.) are having the desired effect. How do I get on my page?

Thanks!

[Bill Robbins]

Nick,

Always glad to help and thank you for your business. Here’s how to add and display your staff members.

1. Go to the Staff section and add your staff members.
2. In the right hand column when you’re adding a staff member, you’ll see a box for “Staff Type.”
3. The Staff Type works basically like a category does for your posts. You can have more than one staff type, or only one, but in order for your staff members to be displayed they will have to be part of a type.
4. Once you have your staff members added to the type, go to the appearance section and select menus.
5. In the menu builder, you’ll see “Staff Type” in the left hand column. Add that to your navigation just like you would a category.
6. If you don’t see “Staff Type” in the left hand column, click the button labeled “Screen Options” in the top right to make sure that the Staff Type is visible.
7. Once you’ve added your staff type to the navigation, that will create a “page” for them.

If you have any questions, let me know,
Bill

[Chris Langille]

Bill,

How can I get all of my staff members to appear on the same page (without having to click the >)?

Thanks

p.s. when I click the >, nothing happens anyway, it just reloads the page

[Bill Robbins]

Chris,

It looks like you have them all listed on at this page.

If you’re still having trouble, let me know,
Bill

[Chris Langille]

That’s not all of them. There are 3 more people on the “next” page, but for whatever reason, when I click the >, it just reloads the page

[Bill Robbins]

Chris,

WordPress is adding some extra information to your url’s like this: http://www.seniorcareministries.org/staff-group/volunteers/?doing_wp_cron=1338604291%2Fpage%2F2/page/2

There shouldn’t be anything between volunteers/ and page. If you take out the middle it will work like this:

http://www.seniorcareministries.org/staff-group/volunteers/page/2

I haven’t seen that before, but a quick online search turned up a stack exchange post that indicated some plugins can cause that. It specifically mentioned Backup Buddy. If your running it, you might check and make sure it isn’t stuck making a backup.

Let me know if you need help,
Bill

[Chris Langille]

Bill, you’re right I was running Backup Buddy. I deactivated it, but I’d still like all of my staff to appear on the same page.

Is that possible with Epic?

Thanks man! Great theme!

[Bill Robbins]

I’m glad you’re liking the theme and sorry for the delay (we’ve been in New Orleans celebrating our anniversary).

The easiest way to have all the staff members show up is to go to the Settings section of your WordPress control panel and choose “Reading.”

Look for where it says Blog pages show at most _____ posts. Change that number to number of staff you’d like to display and save your changes. That should let all your staff be visible and you didn’t have to make any code edits.

If you have any trouble, let me know.

[David Woll]

Hi Bill,

My staff info is running off the bottom of the container. Is there a way to make the container fit all the text?

David

[Bill Robbins]

David,

You can certainly change that. It looks like the line spacing may be a bit more that the default which wouldn’t leave as much room for text there (great font too by the way).

There are two ways to adjust this.

Change the length of the excerpt
Epic uses an excerpt of the bio here to display on the listing page. By default it is set to 55 words, but you can change that. Here’s how:

1. Go to the Appearance section and select edit to open up the theme editor.
2. From the list of files on your right, choose functions.php
3. Scroll down to the very bottom and paste this just above the ?>:

4. Save your changes.

You may want to play with the length just a bit until you have the spacing that you’d like to have. You can alter the length by changing the 20 above to a different number.

---

Change height of individual staff descriptions
You can also just change the height of the individual staff listings. Here’s how to do that:

1. Go to the theme options page and select the styling tab.
2. Choose “yes” at the top to include custom styling.
3. Scroll down to the very bottom until you see a box labeled “Custom CSS”.
4. Paste this into that box:

   
   article.staff-list .wp-post-image {
   	margin-bottom: 50px;
   }
   
   article.staff-list {
   	height: 320px;
   }
   

5. Update your settings.

That will give each staff entry a bit more space. The disadvantage to this method is that it will leave the contact details down below the staff image.

If you have any questions or trouble, just let me know.

Thanks,
Bill

[David Woll]

I’d like to try your first solution.

Maybe a stupid question, but do I paste the link text “https://gist.github.com/3047484” or do I paste the code I see when I click on that link?

“function custom_excerpt_length( $length ) {
return 20;
}
add_filter( ‘excerpt_length’, ‘custom_excerpt_length’, 999 );”

Also, how do I adjust the length of the excerpt?

Thanks, Bill

[Bill Robbins]

Yikes, I posted the link to the code instead of embedding the code.

You’re right, that you’ll use the code on that page (it’s part of the earlier response too). Just change the ’20’ in it to alter the length. The default is 55 to give you a starting point.

If you run into trouble, let me know,
Bill

[David Woll]

Worked like a charm. Perfect! Thank you.

[David Woll]

Hi Bill,

The staff landing page looks great. I changed the length of the excerpt to be shorter, as you advised.

I am running into problems on the individual staff member’s page. Their text is running off the bottom of the white box onto the background of the page. See: http://columbiaheights.ipower.com/staff/paul-tammy-hansen/

Is there a way to adjust this so that the white box on everyone’s individual staff page automatically grows or shrinks to accommodate the text?

David

[Bill Robbins]

David,

Thanks for the link. I took a look and all appeared to be good, but here’s a bit of extra insurance we can add just to make sure that doesn’t happen.

1. Go to the theme options page and select the styling tab.
2. Select “yes” at the top to include custom styling.
3. Scroll down to the bottom until you see the “Custom CSS” box.
4. Paste this into that box:

   
   #content {
   	overflow: hidden;
   }
   

5. Update your settings.

It’s odd, but that will “clear the floats” which should force the content box to be adjust to the content, even with elements aligned to the right or left. The theme has a built in approach, but I’ve seen some instances where that is stripped out on some servers.

If you still have trouble let me know and also let me know which browser and version you’re seeing it in.

Thanks,
Bill

[David Woll]

Hi Bill,

The problem may not have manifested for you because I shortened the length of the staff bios to fit within the white box. Before I did that, the text was running off the bottom of the box onto the background of the webpage.

I’m using Google Chrome, 21.0.1180.60 m ? version – the most updated version.

Ok, so I pasted that code into the custom CSS box on the Theme Options > Styling tab. To test it to see if it worked, I added more text to an individual staff page. http://columbiaheights.ipower.com/staff/pastor-kent-pam-doehne/

Looks great. Only problem is, it only shows an excerpt of the bio, not the whole thing.

When I back up to the staff landing page, it has formatting errors again. See http://columbiaheights.ipower.com/staff-group/pastors/

This was fixed when I changed the excerpt length as you previously helped me do, but now it’s broken again.

If I need to, I can just keep the pastors’ bios brief enough to fit in the box, but is there a way to make it all work?

David

[Bill Robbins]

David,

Is it possible that there is content entered directly into the excerpt box for “Kent & Pam Doehne?” The reason I ask is when an excerpt is generated automatically–when you don’t have content entered directly into the excerpt box–WordPress will strip all HTML tags out of the content that is returned. I noticed some breaks and so forth that are in the bio for them, but not in the other ones. Also WordPress will ignore any preset lengths with a custom made excerpt.

Just let me know,
Bill

[David Woll]

Hi Bill!

Yes! You’re right. As a matter of fact, there was some custom excerpted text in the excerpt box for Kent and Pam Doehne. I removed that text and it eliminated the problem of text going onto the pictures on the staff landing page. : )

The good news:
When I enter the full text in the bio section (not the excerpt – I’m leaving that blank), it does not run off the bottom of the white box.

The bad news:
The text seems to get cut off and hidden when the box ends. The box is not growing to accommodate the text, just cutting off the text.

http://columbiaheights.ipower.com/staff/josh-jill-mccann/

So is it possible to make the white box grow to accommodate the text? It would be nice if it did. Otherwise, I can just truncate the bios, which would be a bit of a bummer, but would be better than text running off the bottom of the box.

Thanks for all your help. I really like this theme and am getting compliments on it!

David

[Bill Robbins]

I feel silly. Here’s what’s happening there. I unintentionally have the height from the listing (archive) view affecting the inside pages. That’s why the text went beyond the white area. I thought we had a float problem, but it was simply a height issue.

You can take out that last snippet I sent you and place this one in its place:

.single article.staff-list {
	height: auto;
}

Update it and you should be good to go. I’m also including that in the theme too.

Let me know if you have any trouble,
Bill

[David Woll]

It works!!!!!!! (Hallelujah chorus music)

Thanks a bunch. : )

[Bill Robbins]

That is awesome news!

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