June 29, 2023 Feature Roundup
Current Theme Version: 5.21.13
Current Blocks Version: 4.7.17
New Plugin: Dirigible Salespeople
Many of our clients use third party services for users to locate sales reps. Sometimes these are in-house salespeople, or sometimes they have close relationships with vendors or certified resellers. Often, our clients have concerns about competitors having access to this rep list and have had to resort to some black magic or trickery to hide that from crawlers or bad actors. We’ve introduced a new plugin to make managing this sort of content easier.
Dirigible Salespeople allows you to create your sales reps with a new Salesperson post type. These are completely freeform posts, so just like any page, you can use any block you’d like within its content. Go nuts!
As you can see, the editing experience for a sales rep is just like a normal page, with the added Rep Data fields on the Rep portion of the Editor Sidebar. Currently, we support a list of applicable zip codes. Visitors to the front end your site can use this zip code information to find their rep. In the future, we plan to add map functionality and sorting by Category.
The plugin comes with it’s own set of options in the Customizer under Customizer → Dirigible Plugins → Salespeople. The options include:
- Slug: This will determine the permalink structure of your sales rep landing pages. Note, if you choose to make your salespeople private, this will not be applicable.
- Public: Whether a post type is intended for use publicly either via the admin interface or by front-end users, which will exclude sales rep from search.
- Allow Archives: Allow salespeople to appear on the front of your site at all. To make salespeople completely private and only accessible through the zip code search, ensure that both Public and Allow Archives are unchecked.
- With Front: Determines if the permastruct be prepended with the front base. (example: if your permalink structure is
/blog/, then your links will be: false →/news/, true →/blog/news/). Defaults to true. - Salespeople Name: This will determine how the salespeople are referred to throughout your site. Examples might be Rep, Vendor, Salesperson, Reseller, etc.
- Salespeople Plural: The plural version of the above, so for these examples, we could use Reps, Vendors, Salespeople, Resellers, etc (respectively).
Adding Salespeople to your site.
Salespeople activates a new block usable on any page called Find A Salesperson. You can add this to any page or post.
You’ll find some display options in the Block Editor Sidebar, including the Title, Title Tag, Title Style, Prompt, and Placeholder. If you’re putting this on a dedicated page by itself, be sure to set that Title Tag as an <h1>! The rest of the options just give you a little more control over the verbiage of the block. If you’d like more options here, feel free to send us suggestions!
You can see the various states of the block above. When the visitor hits on a salesperson, the entire post is loaded for the visitor’s perusal. If more than one salespeople matches the queried zip code, both are loaded sequentially.
A note on privacy
These salespeople are loaded via AJAX, which means that it does not appear anywhere in the code of your website until the user searches for this. This protects your content from crawlers and bad actors, which is especially important if you want to keep your full reseller list private.