Support

I could really use an easy way to link a member's name to their directory profile.  I have a lot of pages where I list a committee chairperson's name or an officer's name as in "See Sue Smith for more information." and I would like to put a hyperlink on 'Sue Smith' that takes the user straight to Sue's directory profile so that the user can find her contact information.

Right now, the only way I've figured out to do this is to log out as an administrator and log back in as a member.  Then go to the member directory and find Sue Smith's profile.  Then I copy the URL of this page to the clipboard or into Notepad if I have more than one profile URL that I need.  Now I log out and log back in as an administrator again.  I go to the place where I want the hyperlink, highlight the hyperlink text, click the Link button, and paste the profile page URL there.  Pfew.  That's a lot of back-and-forth just to get a directory link. 

As an admin I can do this, but our average members who update content on the website would never figure it out.

This is not totally on your point, but I totally agree that it would be really nice to be able to be in the admin mode and open another window with a public and/or member view.  While working on CSS for the horizontal menu, I really needed to keep looking at public and member views to see how they were really looking vs what I thought they looked like.  And in customizing the database fields, it is really nice to pop out and see what the users are going to see, vs what I think the system is going to do.  Easier/Quicker to make adjustments than to keep signing in/out - especially because, at least for me, the is quite a delay as each screen loads in admin mode.

I can kind of do it by opening a screen in Netscape, but I haven't taken the time to download any new browsers and the existing Netscape isn't always reliable - just closes down when it doesn't like something.  I guess I just need to take the time to download firefox or one of the other mozilla browsers and start working with it.  Especially because if I have a public/member view open there I can probably view source and zero in on what I need to change when I don't like something.

More on point, I'd like to figure out how to add an url in front of one of my database fields in the member directory and turn that into a link.  I'm not sure that I'll ever be able to migrate my discussion forum, as the existing one has so much good data I would hate to lose . . . and people already have profiles set up there.  I have a data field in WA that shows their discussion forum ID, so people can cross reference.  It would be nice if I could tell the member directory to use the standard URL with that field as the last part and it would take them to that profile in the other software.

Well, I don't know if WA just changed something or I just did it in a different way, but tonight I've got 2 different instances of explorer running and I'm signed in doing admin on one and viewing public/member on the other.  Great!

Now that's what I call service!

I am happy it works now for you, but we did not change anything.

I usually run IE and FF myself in these cases to see both public and admin view - since they do not share cookies.

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

This sounds quite doable if you can find a good Javascript guy - assembling links on the fly is not a big deal. We had a partner who was showing externally stored member pictures in exactly this way.

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

What about my original question?  Is that doable?

It is doable - just a matter of priorities. Let's see what other say to help us prioritize it.

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

We would like to be able to add the URL of the member profile in customizable emails since not every members are internet savvy; some of them don't even know they can have a URL for their public profile. We can send the URL to ask them if they need to update their info and they can send their URL to their potential clients.

I vote for this, athough I realize that this probably might need as many clicks as keeping up two browsers, which is what I do:  FF & Safari, which can't be used for admin but displays pretty well!

 Also, one trick I use for batches is to export it all into a spread sheet, copy and past the URL for the member profile page, sort by member ID, replace that and copy to a text editor before puttting it in as html.

Not elegant, but workable.

 

 

 

 

FYI - I'm using Explorer 7 on Windows XP.  I find that I can always open one instance in admin mode and one instance in member mode as long as I open 2 separate instances of Explorer.

So open Explorer - sign in as admin.

Open another copy of Explorer - sign in as member.

I can go back and forth as often as needed.  Really nice when making CSS adjustments in member mode or restricted area.  Click preview - switch windows - check to see what happened - switch back and make adjustments - etc.

URL of member profile is now available as a macro - added in 2.37 update.

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot