Boost Connections Business Directory User Profiles

Boost Connections Business Directory User Profiles using Shortcodes

Want to maintain an all-inclusive directory in your site’s user profiles? The Connections Business Directory user profiles plugin is your answer to include a directory that allows you to categorize the members, add several fields of contact, get notifications on upcoming events etc. It can be used to create a simple address book, maintain a staff or member directory, run a business directory or even link directory.

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Consolidate User Data from Other Plugins in One User Profile

Getting Started With Connections Business Directory

Not only is this plugin easy to install and operate, it also gives a wide range of features that are versatile, thus making the plugin more popular. Moreover, this is a free plugin and regular updates enrich its functions continuously.
Right after installing the plugin, a whole list of functions opens up in the backend.

From the “Add Entry” option you start entering your members in the directory. You will get to see all your members from the “Manage” option.

As you can see from the above picture, one gets the liberty to edit the directory entries. Also, categorically search the directory entries from here.

Customizing A User Profile With Connections Business Directory

Now that you have created your connections directory, you can go ahead and integrate your connections in a user profile on your site. So that every time a person logs in they get to see the entire connections list that you have created on the backend. How is this integration done? With the help of the Connections shortcodes. They are very simple ones and doesn’t need coder’s knowledge.

There are fundamentally two main shortcodes that are primarily used to obtain the basic functionalities of the plugin in a user profile, these are:

• [connections] – Shows the entire list of connections entered in the directory
• [upcoming_list] – Shows the upcoming events like birthdays, anniversaries of the members in the directory

Incorporating The Shortcodes With Custom Tab

The first step to customize user profiles with Connection Directory is to get the help of Custom Tabs extension. This plugin enables all the desired tabs in a user profile. Firstly, from the Custom Tabs List create a new tab naming “Connections”.

Now, once you start editing the tab you will get two options – User Custom Posts and Custom Content.
Here you have to select ‘Custom Content’ to get the text area where you will then paste the shortcodes.

As you can see in the above picture, we have put the shortcode “[connections] in the text box. Let’s see what difference it makes on the frontend of the user profile after we click on the save button. There is also an option to select the visibility privacy of the tab. One can choose if it should be visible to the public, or the admin or logged in users etc. However, we have kept the privacy option disabled here.

In the frontend, we can see a tab has appeared on the user profile called “Connection”. Now if we click to see its content we will be able to see the entire connections directory.

Now if we apply the next shortcode that is the [upcoming_list] in the same manner, placing it just after the previous one, we will be able to get the upcoming event list on the frontend.

In the above frontend view, we see that the upcoming event list has appeared. It already has an upcoming birthday notification of the member “Ellen”. In this similar manner, we can apply the other shortcodes –  category, filter, id etc. they will appear on the frontend. ‘Category’ helps to list the connections in the specified category. Filters help to filter the connections according to their department, last name, state, country etc.

Therefore, if we want to customize a user profile with all the features of Connections Business Directory the shortcodes are the key; integrate them with custom tabs and create magic!