For a school: Need to make a teacher directory -- best ideas how?

Site URL: https://www.alicedealmiddleschool.org/

Hi All,
I am struggling to find a way to show a directory of teachers at a large school who is revamping their website (already using SS). Ideally, I'd love to have something like Squarespace has on their own template main page (https://www.squarespace.com/templates) where you can select your category and the info appears. I tweeted them and they said they build that using custom code (which I would suggest is cheating!). They suggested using the blog and archive block feature but as a relative newby I'm struggling with how many clicks it takes to get the info needed. I simply want to show Name and email address for each teacher, but with the archive  block you first have to select the category, then click on the name THEN it goes to a separate page with the name and email. I also will have to organize these by date and not alphabetically, which would be the preference.

Surely there is another way? Thanks!

54 minutes ago, SHHanrahan said:

I'd love to have something like Squarespace has on their own template main page (https://www.squarespace.com/templates) where you can select your category and the info appears. I tweeted them and they said they build that using custom code (which I would suggest is cheating!).

Squarespace is very flexible, but they do impose a number of 'restrictions' or design 'constraints' for standard users. These guardrails are great for newbies and anyone without design experience because they help them to avoid poor style choice, but they can make the platform appear to be less flexible than some others.

When Squarespace say they used 'custom code', this is a standard feature of the Squarespace 7.0 Developer Platform. This is what some Developers use to create feature-rich websites that cannot be built on the template-constrained standard version. When Developer mode is enabled, it's possible to extensively customise it and build almost anything  - as you've seen on Squarespace's own 7.0 website at www.squarespace.com. It's not really cheating, but if you're not familiar with JSON-T it isn't something that you'll want to jump straight into.

54 minutes ago, SHHanrahan said:

They suggested using the blog and archive block feature. Surely there is another way?

There are different options, but itt really depends on the features that you need to include and the number of entries that you'll need to include in the directory.

If the directory will be complex (searchable, sortable or categorised) then they've suggested the best way forward -  a Blog collection and a Summary Block or Archive Block. There are some downsides (as you've noted) because you will need to use arbitrary dates to keep the details artificially alphabetised as the Blog collection cannot do this by itself. There are also limits, such as maximum of 100 items per archive group.

If you want a sortable list on a page then the new Auto Layout feature in Squarespace 7.1 (launched last week) may suit you better.

9 minutes ago, paul2009 said:

Squarespace is very flexible, but they do impose a number of 'restrictions' or design 'constraints' for standard users. These guardrails are great for newbies and anyone without design experience because they help them to avoid poor style choice, but they can make the platform appear to be less flexible than some others.

When Squarespace say they used 'custom code', this is a standard feature of the Squarespace 7.0 Developer Platform. This is what some Developers use to create feature-rich websites that cannot be built on the template-constrained standard version. When Developer mode is enabled, it's possible to extensively customise it and build almost anything  - as you've seen on Squarespace's own 7.0 website at www.squarespace.com. It's not really cheating, but if you're not familiar with JSON-T it isn't something that you'll want to jump straight into.

 

There are different options, but itt really depends on the features that you need to include and the number of entries that you'll need to include in the directory.

If the directory will be complex (searchable, sortable or categorised) then they've suggested the best way forward -  a Blog collection and a Summary Block or Archive Block. There are some downsides (as you've noted) because you will need to use arbitrary dates to keep the details artificially alphabetised as the Blog collection cannot do this by itself. There are also limits, such as maximum of 100 items per archive group.

If you want a sortable list on a page then the new Auto Layout feature in Squarespace 7.1 (launched last week) may suit you better.

 

 

 

1 hour ago, SHHanrahan said:

to show a directory of teachers at a large school who is revamping their website (already using SS). Ideally, I'd love to have something like Squarespace has on their own template main page (https://www.squarespace.com/templates) where you can select your category and the info appears. I tweeted them and they said they build that using custom code (which I would suggest is cheating!). They suggested using the blog and archive block feature but as a relative newby I'm struggling with how many clicks it takes to get the info needed. I simply want to show Name and email address for each teacher, but with the archive  block you first have to select the category, then click on the name THEN it goes to a separate page with the name and email. I also will have to organize these by date and not alphabetically, which would be the preference.

Thanks Paul! Does that new feature allow you to sort people at all? Or is essentially a nice looking table?