Category: Tips/Tricks

Your Web site is a powerful People Connector – and is getting cooler everyday!

You already know that you can connect with and keep in touch with your organization members using the User Connection tool.  But now the Tendenci User Connections features are growing in even more exciting new ways!

As of yesterday’s software update, you can now add, edit, delete and search all of your User Connections on your Web site – giving you even more control over your site contacts.

User Connections makes it easy for you to follow great content and learn who is saying what on your Web site.  Want to know when a board member posts a new article?  Interested in events a specific member posts?  No problem with Tendenci – just Connect!

Want to put a face to a name?  Encourage your users to personalize their profiles on your site by uploading their photo.  This is a great way to ensure members can recognize each other at your next meeting or conference – no more staring at nametags all day!

It couldn’t be easier to upload an image to your profile:

1. View your user profile
2. Click the gray profile photo box (the one with the big question mark in it)
3. Browse your computer for your image
4. Click submit and voila – your profile just got friendlier!

Before:

After:

Did you know you can upload photos of your members to your site? Members (and admins) can view their profile and click the Upload your Picture! link.

Turn your members directory into a facebook! It’s easy and a great way for your members to get to know each other!!

Save a few minutes of your day by using your Tendenci site to generate fax cover sheets for you.   Search for the sendee in your Web site’s membership database and click on the ‘Fax’ icon (see below) to get the process started.

From here you get an automatically generated fax sheet with editable fields for you to type in document page numbers, subject and notes — all with you and your contact’s information already filled in.  Just another little way that Tendenci makes your life easier…

Did you know that you can incorporate chat boxes on your Web site without downloading or installing a single piece of software?

Using a free program like Gabbly, you can embed a chat window onto a CMS page on your Tendenci site and enjoy immediate communication with as many members or clients as you like.

This is a fantastic tool to use during a conference, meeting or brainstorming session.  Now having members in multiple physical locations doesn’t have to be such a headache.  Chat boxes are also a great way to collaborate online without even having to pick up the phone. 

Read our help file on adding chat sessions to your site here.

Tendenci is powerful in its ability to give all of your members a voice.  Distributed authorship is great not only because it gives your Web site new and interesting content, but also because it keeps your membership active and engaged.
But sometimes you may want to make the distinction between an opinion-based piece of content posted by a member and a more objective one written/posted by your organization.

No problem – you are able to label any article with a disclaimer stating that it is a piece of ‘unofficial content’ by following these easy steps.

Schipul loves to repeat the ‘Content is King’ mantra.  By now you may be tired of hearing it, but it’s true!  Fresh content really is important to your search engine ranking and the way your users interact with your site and your organization. 

Everyone likes to be able to add content to their site quickly and easily – which is one of the great things about the Tendenci software.  However, some users have found that one of the fastest ways to do this is by re-activating OLD content.  Not a good thing to do.

Example – An already expired job position comes open again and instead of creating a new job and posting it, an administrator re-activates that original (old) job listing.  Don’t let this happen to you!

But why is activating old content on your Tendenci site so bad?:

1. Dates matter to the search engines.
   You may be able to trick your human users into believing they are seeing new info, but search engines still remember the original add date and are likely to NOT score your old reactivated page.  Yikes!
2. Dates matter to humans.
   Your users DO notice the low numbered ID for the listing. Would you rather attend an event that is number 5 or 500? Doesn’t the latter seem more alive and current?
3. RSS!
   RSS feeds pull your site’s information based on the content’s creation date and time in the database. You may not be able to see this date information, but it is there hiding on every object. Extending an expiration date will NOT put your content back in the RSS feeds. This is by design RSS feeds are supposed to be new content. New is cool!

The moral of the story is to always add new content as new content.  Doing so will keep the search engines, your site users and your RSS feeds happy and up-to-date.  Happy content adding!