Hyrbid meetings

I would think you’d need to create two meetings – one with a physical address and the other with the online info. You could edit the meeting name to indicate what the difference is.

What area are you in where folks are going to meet in person? Are there going to be restrictions on the number of people that can be in a physical location?

• This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by TheViv.

Hi @theronb,

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you.

As we tried to design (short fused) changes to the plugin, we discussed the selecting “Online Meeting” — but not “Location Temporarily Closed” — would reasonably reflect a hybrid meeting.

Something we’ve discussed is to change the “Online Meeting” to display as “Online Meeting Option” or “Online Option”, something like that.

Your feedback would be great.

@octotoot We’re Portland Area Intergroup in the Portland, Oregon area. Parts of the state are getting Phase 1 releases; for Portland it will be a few weeks yet, at least before we get the go-ahead.

@tech2serve I passed off the question about feedback to Garry, our office manager, who is more experienced than I. We’re not looking to make more work for tech support, just want to make the best use of TSML features in a way that makes sense to users. Thanks!

Here’s Garry’s reply – he works closely with our hotline volunteers and many of his concerns about how meetings are listed in TSML are related to how the volunteers need to use it:

“I like “Online Option” but what if I am looking for Online, Men, step study, closed?
We need to be able to filter for every “type”.
The individual user can muddle through but people all over the world that are on hotlines using the app or TSML on a website, need to filter, filter , filter to help the caller in the best way.
They really need to add that feature. It has been my complaint from the first day. None of the testers or developers have been a recent hotline volunteer obviously.”

Thanks!

Chiming in late here…
Just a thought or two…

It seems to me that we simply have to have additional listings if groups open up at their usual physical location and also have an online meeting, as TheViv suggested. One could refer to the other in the meetingnotes. If those online meetings stop at some point, delete those entries.

About complex searches for phone line volunteers:
Would it not serve us all if we had access to an ‘Advanced Search’ window?

I know a search by multiple criteria is not written in a minute. But if it existed, finding the data would be up to the website visitor and all the development team would have to do is write the code, without needing knowledge about any specific content in the checkbox values. Is this not keeping it ‘simpler’?

Wordpress is a fantastic tool for content management, but it is not a database system in classical terms. So expecting it to be able to do complex searches might be too much to ask for. It also requires some insight of the user of the website. It is not always the plugin or other tools that are missing functionality. Sometimes it is a matter of educating our users.

As a sideline for the development team:
In my line of IT business more and more technologies are going ‘codeless’. A good example of a simple online implementation of that technique is in Jotform. It is a tool that I use to build online forms for the website. These forms can be made conditional. What that means is: I define that, when Box 1 has the value ‘not applicable’ another series of Boxes is hidden. When Box 1 has another value, I can indicate to show those other boxes to be displayed. This can be defined in ‘flows’ without any knowledge of underlying code. The intelligence (with full code) is at a different level and the ‘normal’ user does not have to bother with it.

I am not sure that this already exists for plugin-buiders but I am fascinated by the new horizons that open up with these codeless platforms.

Hi @theronb,

Regarding the filter, please come over to our dev site and create a Feature Request. It is a reasonable suggestion that I think our development team could discuss.

Thank you.