Gravatar not showing

I’m happy to help out @ernienet. I’ll address each item individually.

The gravatar is not showing on the website display (using the shortcode to display board members on the site).

I’m not sure if this is a setting somewhere else in WP or if it’s something I need to edit in the template file – I moved it to my theme folder to customize it, but have not made any changes to it yet.

The gravatar should show automatically when using the [list_board_members] shortcode. The first step is to make sure that each board member has added their photo to https://gravatar.com/. If they haven’t added a photo there, then nothing will be displayed. After that, we’d recommend you check that the email addresses for each WordPress user on your site match the one used to set up each gravatar. If they don’t match, then the images won’t show. Finally, if that doesn’t help, we’d recommend checking the error logs for your website to see if anything shows up there. It’s possible the gravatars are being blocked for some reason.

I also need to sort the board members and would like to link to a contact form for some of them. Has anyone been able to create solutions for those issues?

Both of these adjustments would require you to have some PHP coding knowledge. For sorting the board members, you’ll need specific knowledge of how hooks work within WordPress. Once you’re comfortable, we’d recommend taking a look at the winbm_users_serving hook, which would allow you to modify the order that the board members are shown.

For linking to a contact form, you should be able to do that directly within the list-board-members.php file you copied to your theme.

Unfortunately, we’re not able to provide support on custom coding, but hopefully that’s enough to get you started.

Let us know how it goes and have a great day!

Thank you, Jonathan.

I know this is a free plugin, so it’s doubly appreciated when you actively support it. As for the gravatar, I suspect that’s exactly what the client did – I walked her through creating her gravatar in a training session, and I noticed she used her personal email instead of her business email. I’ll email her with your explanation – I never would have figured that out on my own!

I suspect, to the extent that your plugin is used for your own clients, that you might be able to justify charging for the plugin. The distinction your plugin has over similar plugins is that it uses the USER database in the WordPress core to create the board members – this reduces redundancy and allows users to update their own profiles when they have their own accounts. Continued development and feature enhancement will really make this plugin stand out among the others. I’m looking forward to learning to use the other features and teach them to my clients.

If anyone out there has created a hook using winbm_users_serving for sorting the list and has a simple explanation for how to create and implement a hook in WP (I’ve done a little research and it appears to be over my head), I think a lot of people would benefit from having it posted here.

In my case, I need to order the board members according to their position, so an additional field is needed to establish a sort order because the position title is not going to be alphabetical.

I don’t know if the hook can be coded directly into the list-board-members.php file or not. If so, that would be very convenient :). But if not, fundamentals of how to create hooks and how to activate them in WordPress would be very helpful. Most of the tutorials I found on hooks make a lot of assumptions that that reader already knows certain things.

In Joomla, I use Community Builder and create a field called “Ordering” where the client can simply enter a number and the underlying query will sort first by the number, then by the last name, then by first name ascending. I didn’t need to code anything.

I find most WordPress plugins don’t have as much in terms of advanced features built-in as Joomla does. It’s been a challenge for me to support my WordPress clients at the same level as my Joomla clients.

Thank you,
Ernie

Thanks for the kind thoughts about the plugin Ernie. The benefits you mentioned about using the built-in WordPress users system are exactly why we chose that route.

In regards to working with hooks in WordPress, you could always consider hiring a WordPress developer using a service like Fiverr or Upwork. There are plenty of good ones on those marketplaces that should be able to help.

I’m going to mark this resolved, but don’t hesitate to reach out if any other questions come up. Take care.