Add a “Featured Member” to your Front Page!

RYO Membership Directory Plugin Administrator Manual
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Here's a Great Way to Build Excitement!

What if you could feature a different member every day at the top of your front page? Would that be exciting for the featured member? Sure! And others in membership will get a kick out of it, too, especially knowing their turn will come. It looks like a lot of work because every day you change your front page, but here's our "little secret:" It's easy to set up and then it takes care of itself! Here's what you can do...

At its simplest, you set up a Page and just enter this shortcode:

[featuredmember]

Under Settings, Reading choose this Page to be your "static" front page. (If you already have a static front page just add the above code to the existing Page.)

This will display the search listing with our standard format.

Every day, the computer will do this for you:

1. Pick a qualified member at random from the membership. Qualified means a current member who has entered into the system information for their profile and promo copy, and who has uploaded an image. (You can change these requirements if you wish.)
2. Each day's choice will be from members not previously chosen, until all qualified members have been selected. Then the computer will start over with a new random sequence.
3. The computer will send you a notification of who was chosen as an email through the hourly notification system (unless you've turned that off).
4. The computer will send an email from you to the featured member to tell them that they are featured that day. This helps create excitement and build value among the membership. (You will have to add your email information for this to work.)
5. The computer will keep a record of each featured member so you can have a special Page that lists recently featured members.
6. The computer will format a small box on your front page, similar to the search results, with a photo and short descriptive copy from the promo field.
7. If you've enabled RSS feeds and if the member has entered their RSS feed URL in their profile, two most recent headlines will be displayed from the member's blog.

Again, this all happens automatically! You just set it up and promote to membership that they need to update their profiles so they can be chosen. (It would be embarrassing to feature someone on the front page without a photo, or related copy... that's why we made it a requirement.)

You'll probably want to set it up to send an email to the featured member every day!

Here's how. Just add a bit of information to the set up code, substituting your email address and name:

[featuredmember emailfrom="yourname@example.com" emailfromname="Your Name"]

Note that if you're assigning more than one word as a value (like with your name), the value must be enclosed in quotation marks.

Use these attributes to customize your Featured Member Page:

1. membertypes: This is a list of member types to include when selecting a member to feature. You may include multiple types by listing them with a comma separating them and enclosing the list in quotation marks. If you don't make a selection here, all member types will be included.
2. required: This is a list of fields required in order to be selected. The standard is profile,promo,image but you can change this to include: profile, promo, ts1, ts2, ts3, ts4, ts5, ts6, cf1, cf2, cf3, cf4, cf5, cf6, cf7, fname, lname, company, office, image, or rssfeed.
   Note: If you require the office field, your Featured Member selection will be restricted to those who hold office... great for a Featured Board Member kind of feature!
3. template: The feature is displayed with an image and a short description. Set this to featuretemplate1 or featuretemplate2 to select a different template.
4. days: Normally the feature changes every day, but you can set this to any number of days you wish.
5. key: If you decide to place more than one Featured Member feature on a page, you need to identify each one with a "key" letter, like a, b, or c.
6. keyword: The template will include this keyword (or words). We set it to 'Featured Member:', but you can make it something else. This is especially handy if you use more than one Featured Member on your website. Change the keywords and you don't have to struggle with the more limited templates. Examples: Featured Member, Featured Vendor, Featured Rookie, Featured Board Member.
7. notfound: Normally, if there is no qualified member, the software display's nothing, but you can use this tag to specify something else, like "No member is featured today."
8. emailfrom: Enter your from email address here and he software will send an email to the featured member when chosen.
9. emailfromname: Enter your name here (in quotation marks) and the email will be sent under your name.
10. email: You can change the short email we send by entering your text here. Enter \n to start a new line. If you do nothing with this the email text is: Hello {fname},\n\nI thought you should know:\n\nYou are Featured at {website}...\nfor {today}... TODAY!
11. emailsubject: You can change the subject line on the email we send by entering your text here. If you do nothing with this the subject line is:
    "Featured on {website}:"
    and then the member's name or company name
    Codes you can include that will be updated for the member are:
    {fname} First Name
    {flname} First and Last Name
    {companyname} Company Name (First and Last name are substituted if there is no company name)
    {website} Website address
    {today} Today's date.

Here's an example. Note that you only need to set the attributes you want to change.

[featuredmember
membertypes=Professional
emailfrom="yourname@example.com"
emailfromname="Your Name"]

So, You Want a Page with Previously Featured Members?

That's easy! It's very similar to setting up a Member Directory Page.

This is how you set up a page to display a listing of your members.

The Featured Member is created with the [featuredhistory] shortcode.

Create a Page and place the shortcode on the page. Normally, you would have nothing else on the page. In it's simplest form, it would look like this:

[featuredhistory]

This will display your featured members in date order with our standard format, most recent date first. You may modify that somewhat by specifying special attributes within the [featuredhistory] shortcode, as in :

[featuredhistory attribute1=value attribute2="Value of more than one word"]

Note that if you're assigning more than one word as a value, the value must be enclosed in quotation marks.

Each directory has three separate "views" which you control:

1. The "Directory View" is the initial page seen by a guest. For the Featured Member History page, it's a list of members.
2. The "Search View" is the list of members seen after a keyword search request. Most users don't include search for Featured Member History pages.
3. The "Detail View" is the detailed information displayed about a single member after clicking that members listing in a directory list or search results list.

As far as WordPress is concerned this all happens on one Page. In practice, that one Page shows a lot of different information.

Use these attributes to customize your Directory:

None of these need to be used unless you want to change the way your directory is put together. The standard directory is already set up in the software.

• membertypes: This is a list of member types to include in this page. You may include multiple types by listing them with a comma separating them and enclosing the list in quotation marks. If you don't set this, all member types are included.
• pagekeys: Normally, all pages will be included but you can restrict the display to certain Featured Member blocks only. Each page carries an ID number, plus a special "key" if you have more than one featured member block on the same page. If no key was used, just use the Page ID number. If a key was used, use the Page ID, plus a hyphen and the key letter. (Have your webmaster check the Page's html. Search for "Featured Member." They will find hidden code that reads: <!-- Featured Member 332: The 322 is the pagekey.
• format: This attribute indicates whether a Search Field will be included on your Directory Page. D = No Search Field. SD = Search Field included.
• top: Set this to change the text that appears at the top of the page.

Appearance of the Directory View:

• directoryview: Set this to the name of the list template you want to display each record in the initial directory listing. Typically featuredhistory1 or featuredhistory2
• perpage: Set this to the number of entries you want to display per page for the initial directory listing.

If you're including a Search Box:

• searchhead: This text will appear over the Search entry box.

Appearance of the Search View (if you include a Search Box):

• searchview: Set this to the name of the list template you want to display the each record when a search has been initiated. We normally use the same as directoryview (above).
• resultsinstructions: This text will appear over the search results after a report indicating how many results were obtained.
• searchperpage: Set this to the number of entries you want to display per page for search results. Again, we normally set this to the same page size as the initial listing.

Appearance of the Detail View, a Member's Detail Page:

• detailview: Set this to the name of the detail template you want to display the full member profile when someone clicks on a directory listing. Typically detailtemplate1

Here's an example. Note that you only need to set the attributes for those you want to change.

[featuredhistory
membertypes=Regular
top="Regular Members who have been featured on this website:"]

Template Layout codes for Featured Member Display:

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