People tool

The people tool allows you to easily manage lists of people.

While there are centralized sources of some people like the faculty profiles and the ClarkU people directory, sometimes it’s useful to manage people on a website independently. Reasons might be that you want better control over job titles or images. Or perhaps you want to list people like staff, students, or people unaffiliated with Clark.

With the people tool, you just add custom people posts, and that’s it. To display them, add the people block to a page, and pick the appropriate group. When you display them, you have the choice whether or not to link to them, so if they don’t have bios, that’s OK.

Adding people

Before a person can be listed on a page, they need to be entered into the people tool. In the admin dashboard, look for “People” on the left-hand side, and then select “add new person.” Enter their name as the title, and then their bio in the content area if they have one. The rest of the fields will be on the right-hand side of the editor.

• Featured image: If a photo is desired, add it as the featured image. It’s best to crop the photo to a square 720×720 pixels, if possible. People without photos will just have their initials in a circle instead.
• Sort order: Affects the order in which people are displayed on the page. In general, using a person’s last name is standard, but you can use something else if needed. Additionally, if you want the unit head, say, Jonas Clark, at the top of the list, add an a or two to the sort name. So instead of sort name: clark, use sort name: aa-clark.
• Title: As the name implies, lists the person’s job title. However, the title field can double as another differentiator if a title doesn’t apply to the type of people you’re listing.
• Email and phone: Are self-explanatory and can be left blank if you don’t want them displayed on the site.
• Group: Dictates what people are displayed when you add a people block to a page.

Groups

Groups are how you can segment different types of people, for example, staff, student workers, and researchers. By default, the group field is blank, so you need to assign the correct group or create a new one when you add a person. Individual people can belong to many groups.

Editing existing people

If a person already exists on the site and you just need to update their photo, contact information, or title, there’s no need to create a new listing. Simply go to the people tool, locate the person, and click on them to edit. There you’ll see all the fields mentioned above and can update them as needed.

People block

Once a person is added in the people tool, you’ll need to add a people block to a page for them to appear. Add a block and type /people, and it’ll show up. By default, the people block will list all people, but you can select a group on the right-hand side to filter the listing accordingly.

Example listing

How to remove people

Navigate to the Admin Dashboard -> People. If you want to remove the person from the entire site, hover over the person, and click “Trash.” If you want to remove the person from a particular group, click the person to edit them, then adjust the Groups values in the right sidebar.

Advanced class names

The people block lets you specify class names that change the layout of people. The supported class names are: halves, thirds, and fourths. Thirds is the default, but if you want people to display two or four to a row, the class names let you do that.

The people archive

By default, the people tool creates an “archive page” on the site. It’ll be at /people. If you don’t want it there or want to control what’s on it, simply create a page with the same URL and design it as desired. It’s probably most intuitive for visitors if you include a list of all the people on it, but you might want to group them in a special way.

The people shortcode

For greater control over how your people display, there’s a shortcode that you can use as an alternative to the block.

Examples

Display a list of people in a “staff” group:

[clarku-people group="staff"]

Display a list of all people without links to people posts:

[clarku-people link="false"]

The full list of attributes for the shortcode are:

• group expects the slug of a valid peoplegroup category.
• group_operator Defaults to “OR” but can be set to “AND”
• posts_per_page expects a whole number. It limits the results to the specified amount. Default is 200
• link controls whether or not the card lists link to posts. Set to “false” to not link (default: true)
• email controls whether or not to display the email address on card lists (default: true)
• phone controls whether or not to display the phone number on card lists (default: true)
• thumbnail expects the name of an image format like “medium.” Set to “false” to hide thumbnails.
• before allows HTML to be inserted before the list of people. It defaults to <div class=”clarku-people-tool”>
• after allows HTML to be inserted after the list of people. It defaults to </div>