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The Special Libraries Association (SLA), serving thousands of information professionals worldwide, is known to consistently rejuvenate itself . The overhaul of its website would be no different.

SLA teamed up with The Web Development Group (WDG) to modernize its online aesthetics, streamline the website user experience and simplify content management by moving to a WordPress content management system (CMS). SLA also required that members, as maintained via their Association Management System (AMS), would be able to view member-only content.

It’s Thursday and the WDG team is currently in Columbia, South Carolina to Converge SE.  Why am I not there, you ask?  Well, I waited too long to buy a ticket. Shame on me. But you know what, life’s looking up now that I get to write the Weekly Wrap Up!

I learn something new every week here at WDG … if you aren’t learning something new on a weekly basis, then you’re most likely not living life right.  This week, I was able to work with one of my favorite plugins, Gravity Forms, to allow visitors to write and print a letter to send to their State Representative or Senator.  Gravity Forms has specific Post fields that come in handy when you unregistered users to submit post content.

I used three fields for the template letter form:

1. Title field
2. Body field
3. Custom field

The Body field was hidden (the visibility can be changed under the advanced tab of the field) to everyone except for the admin and contained the body of letter.  So the user would only see two fields, the Title and Custom field.  In the advanced tab for each field there’s a box you can check that creates a content template.

When you click this you should a see a drop down list that includes your field.  Select the the field and it will create a merge tag.  Once you have all your fields you can created your own template in the confirmation area of your form.  Since mine was a letter it looked something like this -

Dear {Recipients Name:8}:

{Post Body:6}

Sincererly,

{Your Name:7}

After the user fills out their name and the recipients name in the form and submits, it created the letter.  So if you didn’t already know about gravity form post fields, I hope that helps.

On another note (for all you devs, designers, whoever), be on  the lookout for an invite to a party at the WDG shop in the near future – should have booze, food, music, and normal party stuff.  Lastly, make sure you apply to GivebackDC.  I was deathly ill last year, but I’ll be ready to go this time.  It’s for a good cause, and last year we helped put diapers on baby bottoms.

Now to take you into the weekend, a random man (not me … my twin) doing the Carlton dance…

The Soyfoods Association of North America (SANA) approached The Web Development Group looking to have www.soyfoodsmonth.org refreshed. The purpose of this site is to make the general population more aware of soyfoods month. WDG’s WordPress development team worked closely with SANA to ensure that the changes made reflected the organization’s goals.

In order to help build a larger audience and make soyfoods month better known to the targeted audiences, the development team focused on making the site social media friendly. Social media buttons are at the top left and right of the header menu. As a visitor to the site scrolls down, the menu also follows them down so the social media buttons are always presence.