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Questions about creating auto fill profile fields

  • @violet914

    Member

    12 years, 7 months ago

    Hello! I am a WordPress newbie trying to create a social networking site for a niche group with Buddypress. I would like my users to be able to display all colleges/universities attended on their profile, and for other users to be able to search for other members based on this information. I have two questions:
    1) I have a list of ~230,000 colleges/universities. Assuming this information can live somewhere on my WP site, is there a plugin that will automatically detect the name of the school a user enters and then auto fill the field so that it matches the school’s ‘standard’ name on the list? LinkedIn has a function like this, but I have no idea how it works on the back end.

    2) Is it even necessary that the school field be standardized as described above in order for users to successfully search for other members? For example, if one user reports that they attended “UNC” and another reports “University of North Carolina,” will the first user be as searchable as the second?

    I really would like to be able to compel users to use the standard names for consistency’s sake, but I’m not sure if it’s possible in Buddypress.

    Apologies if these questions are unclear or misguided. I am a total beginner! Thanks for your help!

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)

  • @yadigit

    Participant

    12 years, 7 months ago

    Hello, im going to tell you a quick easy way to do step number 1.
    Create a field called School or w.e you want to make it and make a drop down field of all the schools that you can think of.

    I would also download buddyprress-better-directory ( it may not scale well with your theme depending on what theme you are using )

    so now onto question number 2. As I said for your answer for number one, using the drop down menu for the schools will make it easier to search rather then having the members type in their school. as far as searching for UNC and University of North Carolina, Im sure the search would list all the UNC first, then list the University of North Carolina,

    I would also suggest installing s2Members (plugin) and follow the steps to help make your buddypress/wordpress more secure,

    @vuiet914

    Best of Luck,
    Ps, this is just a suggestion and it really isn’t a FULL answer to your questions.

    @violet914

    Member

    12 years, 7 months ago

    Thanks so much for your help! I have begun to explore the drop down menu strategy, however I don’t know how I will manually enter 230,000 schools into the drop down field. Is there a way to do this quickly? For example, perhaps I can just upload the entire list somehow? Thanks again!

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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