Listing Meeting Reopenings

Also is there a shortcode to dynamically search for a meeting name? Something like [tsml_meeting_name]? I tried that but it doesn’t resolve.

Hi @chip902 (Andrew)–

We don’t have a way for user’s to update meetings directly, and I suspect WordPress permissions wouldn’t allow this without some significant mods.

TSML does have a way you can have users provide feedback about meetings, and that might be the best option for your admin/you finding out about a meeting reopening.

I’m not following you with your second question.

Thank you @tech2serve for replying to me! I guess what I’m trying to do in a gravity form is to give the user the ability to type in a text box their meeting. Effectively doing a tsml-query similar to this as they are typing /?tsml-day=any&tsml-query=test+query

This would allow me to get them to modify their “Location Temp Closed” flag

I’m with you now. We don’t have anything like that I’m aware of.

If you want to pursue this, I suggest coming over the our dev site, and creating a fork of the plugin to try and create your own short code. We’re happy to have devs contribute.

We actually do, but it is a bit hidden and not intuitive.
In the filters in the header of the list of meetings is a search section with a magnifying glass icon.
You can type criteria for the location and for the name of the group. After entering the criteria, hitting the magnifying glass performs the search and the results are then shown in the list.

The less intuitive part is that it takes the other filters into consideration as well. So if you were to enter ‘Toronto’ and the other filter is set to a District outside of Toronto or on a day where there is no meeting in Toronto, it would come up with an empty list.

I would love a more advances way to search in both front end and back end of WordPress. My site does have a general search box in its menu and whatever I enter in there will also act on the meetings.

It is always hard to make a website or tool that is intuitive for all, it must be hard to design or else it would already be there. But the filter search is better than nothing,

Nicky

@osnicky59 I’m not following here… Is there a way I can get this into a gravity form somehow to get the front end user to get rid of the loc temp closed flag?

OK, Sorry for confusing you. I have re-read your original posting and I realise that my answer does not fit your question. I thought you were referring to the basic TMSL-meeting pages. I don’t use gravity forms so I have no advice for you to put this in there.

I have my meeting details in a FileMaker database. The names of my groups are in there. I have also created a box that contains an adjusted group name. It looks like this:
(TC) groupname – town – (D3) for temporarily closed meetings. I mark group names that are online with (elec) groupname – town – (D3).

I then have a version of the group name that takes out all spaces and substitutes them by hyphens. Same for my ‘(‘ and ‘)’. I then configure what is the prefix of the page url (the name of the site) and the suffix (the bit that is like ‘/?tsml-day=any’ The result is the name of the group listing that looks the same as the url when I am on that groups details page. It goes from the true group name:
(elec) Keep It Simple AFG – Barrie (D1) to:
https://al-anon.alateen.on.ca/meetings/elec-al-anon-spoken-here-afg-toronto-d19/?tsml-day=any

All of this is then to make the finding of the meeting easier in the front end, which can be helpful. But then going from that details page into the backend, unfortunately the address of that same page looks different:
https://al-anon.alateen.on.ca/wp-admin/post.php?post=30368&action=edit

And I really wished we would have a list of the PHP post code that is appended to that particular meeting. Then I could go there directly using the URL and make my changes. In and out within seconds.

In your case, if you have a list of the group/meeting list in your gravity form and if you can transform the name of the listing as described above, it should bring users to the relevant listing. On the Listing Details page is a ‘Request to change this listing’ that can then be emaild to notify you about changed. Since the full name as used on the website is given in that email,it is helpful to use it as a search of the name in the backend. And then make your changes.

If it is not possible in Gravity to calculate the URL names to what is in the URL address online, than the thing you wish to do is not possible. It would at minimum require that adjusted name to make it the same as the real URL link.

Teaching your users to use the filters that are already there in the Listview of the meeting seems a more simple idea.

I was just thinking aloud here, I hope I have not confused you….

To the Developer People:

If anyone at any time can shed some light on the number of the post that is visibly only in the backend when you are in a specific meeting listing, that might be a tremendous help for finding a meeting that needs a correction. If I could access that page in the backed of the website, it would be a huge, huge timesaver to be able to go there directly.

I hope it helps….

+1 on the request to the Devs @osnicky59 @tech2serve :). I’m sadly not super fluent in php so I don’t feel confident in making my own Shortcode; I guess the only thing I can do right now is to collect form entries now and then manually search them out to flag them as “no longer closed”

@osnicky59, @chip902,

Every meeting in WordPress has an associated unique slug. For example, in my dev database, ?tsml_meeting=happy-joyous-and-free-2, the part after the = is unique for the meeting. That is the only real identifier. You can extract this from the URL of the meeting.

HTH

I keep my meeting data updated in an off-website database.
I use the link to the frontend as visible in the URL to quickly go to the meeting details (e.g. https://al-anon.alateen.on.ca/meetings/elec-faith,-hope,-&-serenity-afg-orillia-d1/?tsml-day=any). I calculate that URL with the name of the meeting in my database.

I also use the backend WordPress Post ID to do the same for instantly jumping to edit mode for the relevant meeting. Unfortunately the Post ID is not accessible via the plugin, but you see it when hovering over any of the meetings in the meetings list. It looks something like this:
https://al-anon.alateen.on.ca/wp-admin/post.php?post=30388&action=edit
I calculate this string using the post ID. One time exercise to include it in all listings, but after that it is a huge timesaver.

No need to go to the TSML list, perform a find by name or something else, then click ‘Edit’ to access the data. All of those steps are skipped.

The only thing I need to keep an eye on is adjusting the post ID after doing a batch import. But with the current features in the plugin there is less and less need for that.

All of these things are personal choices and all require some work at some point, but when the choice is mine, I’d rather invest one chunk of time and then benefit from more speed and less actions, then having to go through the same actions every time I need to make an edit.

I cannot believe that the only unique identifier is the name of the meeting in the slug. If WordPress has the post ID, then why can that not be included in exports so that we can re-import a changed batch? Anyway, it is probably harder than I can imagine and my solutions fits my workflow right now.

I did find a simple plugin, Show IDs, that will display the IDs of each post in the WordPress backend. The ID is also in the XML Export of the Meeting list so now I am concentrating of learning how to work with XML. It sure keeps me off the streets!

Hey @tech2serve ! I had a follow up question. I managed to get our list of meetings to display here: nyintergroup.org/meetings/

However what query string parameter can I use to hide all “Loc temp closed” meetings?

Fort Worth has over a 1,200 meetings and 109 locations.
What’s happening is a gradual reopening, where some meetings are reopening for a particular location but not all.
What’s your thoughts on changing “Location Temporarily Closed” to “Meeting Temporarily Closed” ?

Hey @chip902, I’m not aware of anything you can put in the URL to do this, maybe @tech2serve knows of a way to do that. However, if I understand your question correctly, you may be able to do it by adding a couple lines of CSS, probably under customize appearance part of your theme.

#tsml #meetings .results table tbody tr.type-tc {display:none;}
#tsml #meetings .results table tbody tr.type-onl {display:table-row;}

All your meetings are still on the page, but the CSS is telling the browser not to display them. A couple downsides of this are that the background colors don’t alternate correctly, and this will hide the Loc temp closed meetings on all meeting listings from the tsml plugin.

Thanks @brianwarea24

I wound up adding a new Meeting Type called “Reopened Meeting” and I’m calling it on the query string. Seems to work fine.