How to add a qualifier to a Speaker's name in the Services Widget

By UUA Web Team
December 7, 2015, 6:08 pm EST

I have just added a few upcoming services on our test site, based on the real upcoming services at our congregation. We have several examples of speakers: Rev. Joan Spivak and Maureen Adams, Music Director and: Matilda Armitage, with Joan Armadillo (All names made up, to protect the innocent. :) ) The problem appears to be that entering a comma in the Service speaker field separates speakers, whereas, in the first example above, we want the comma to designate the role of the speaker. (I've temporarily used a colon instead of a comma for this purpose, but it's not ideal.) Another problem appears to be that of the second example, where instead of showing speakers separated by commas, we want to separate them by something else: " with ", or " assisted by ", or similar separators. So, how best can we accommodate such combinations in the current Services plugin? Is there a possibility that a future version might allow more flexibility such as shown above? Thanks for listening!

Comments (2)

Five years ago, Christopher Wulff wrote:

No intention of adding any such functionality. The use case is just way too limited. An upcoming version of the plugin will add some hooks and filters so you could overwrite some functionality but I doubt the authors would be included in that. The use of structures like you're suggesting would mean not using a taxonomy and instead using simple text in a custom field which would then make it impossible to filter services by the participants in them, which is a too significant loss. I might suggest that the level of customizability that you seem to be looking for might be better addressed by building your own theme rather than trying to modify this one.

Brian replied:

No problem, Christopher. I just thought I'd point out the issue, and ask.
I wouldn't change to another theme because of this minor issue.

Drrunnels wrote:

Just for the record, I find myself in the same position as Bryan, though I understand your response Christopher. Perhaps when everything else is working jolly and you find yourself twiddling your thumbs this would be something you could update. I am sensitive to potential offense a speaker (particularly a guest speaker) may take at the lack of qualifiers. I will use the same work around Bryan has suggested, I just wanted to add this for the record that he is not alone. :-)