NC State Directory Plugin

This plugin interfaces with ldap.ncsu.edu to pull the following information from the campus directory:

• Unity ID
• Email Address
• (Preferred) First Name
• Last Name
• Working Title
• Website
• Telephone Number
• Primary Role (i.e. faculty, staff, student)
• Campus Address

Information is pulled from the campus directory by specifying an OUC(s) and/or Unity ID(s). The above information is then added to a Person custom post type's custom fields. A person can also be manually added directly within WordPress.

Working with Content

You can add additional data to the custom post type (CPT) by adding additional custom fields with WordPress's native custom field interface, or you could use a plugin such as Advanced Custom Fields to provide a more polished interface.

By default, your website will query the campus directory to get any changes or updates every 24 hours. Sometimes it is necessary to manually override data that comes from the campus directory. This is particularly useful for people with multiple working titles. The plugin allows you to do that by disabling updates from the campus directory on a person-by-person basis.

Content Organization

The plugin can group people into different subgroups. By default, it places people into a Faculty, Staff, or Student subgroup based upon information from the campus directory. You can add additional subgroups and manually place people within one or more of those subgroups. This is useful when creating a staff listing based upon office or to place faculty members into a designated research area.

You can also use WordPress's native "tagging" system to organize people in a less structured way. For example, you could place a faculty member in a broader subgroup such as "Animal Behavior" and then provide tags for the specifc animals they study ("mice", "primates", and "birds," for example).

Displaying Content

Due to the specific nuances and requirements of different sites, this plugin doesn't have a standarized view of directory information. Rather, it provides a standarized approach of accessing directory information from the CMS. A specific view (or views) can then be created that meet the needs of an individual site.

The Person custom post type can be queried as a stand post type. You can also query posts based upon subgroup (i.e. custom taxonomy) or custom fields data to display a subset of people. Default index.php and single.php are provided within the views directory of the plugin.

It is recommended that you place your customized versions of index.php and single.php within your theme. This will allow you to update the plugin without overwriting your custom views. The plugin will first check to see if there is a ncstate-directory/views/index.php or ncstate-directory/views/single.php directory structure and file within the root of your theme.

Shortcodes

If you do not want to create custom views within your theme, you can use shortcodes to display information from the People custom post type.

Display Single Person

Information about a single person can be displayed with the following syntax:

[person unity_id="csthomp2"]
	[person_info field="first_name"]
	[person_info field="last_name"]
	[person_info field="email"]
[/person]

The field parameter corresponds to the custom field name of a Person post type.

Display Group of People

You can display an entire subgroup of people with the following syntax:

[directory group="faculty"]

The HTML output for the directory shortcode can be set within the views/directory_listing.php file of the plugin.

Display Unordered List of Group of People

You can also display a group of people as an unordered list who's names link to their full profile with the following syntax:

[directory-list group="subgroup" columns=x]

where subgroup is the slug of any subgroup of people you define and column is the number of columns you want the list split into. The output can be customized within the views/directory_listing.php or by copying this file into your theme ncstate-directory/views/directory_listing.php for customization there. The default output uses Bootstrap markup for rendering.

Removing People

Due to how the plugin pulls data from the campus directory, you cannot simply delete a person from WordPress. If someone is simply deleted, they will be added again the next time your website queries the campus directory. This only applies if the person was added through an OUC that is still listed within Settings of the People CPT. If a person was added by specifying their Unity ID, simply remove their Unity ID from Settings page.

If you need to delete someone who was pulled through an active OUC, you will set that post to either Draft or Private. This will be prevent the person from being listed on your public-facing site.

Removing a Unity ID or OUC on the Settings page will not remove the associated people from WordPress.

Theme Developer Functions

Function Name	Description
have_the_profile_publications	Returns true if the current profile has publications, false otherwise. Calling this does query the SPR web service if there is no current cache for the data.
the_profile_publications	Returns an array of Citation objects. Only works for profiles with meta field of spr_author_id specified. If not found, returns empty array.
have_the_profile_grants	Returns true if the current profile has grants, false otherwise. Calling this does query the Grants web service if there is no current cache for the data.
the_profile_grants	Returns an array of Grant objects. Only works for profiles that have specified show_grants to be 1 and have a valid uid. If not found, returns empty array.

Building the Plugin

A build script is included to make it easier to create the plugin archive WordPress is expecting if you did a manual install of the plugin where you uploaded the archive through the web interface. To build the plugin like this:

1. Navigate to the root of the repository.
2. Determine where you want to store the archive before add/uploading to WordPress. We'll use /tmp as an example.
3. Run bin/build /tmp. This places a zip-file called ncstate-directory.zip into /tmp.

You can then take this file and install it on WordPress.