Update 2024
Its been 8 years since I wrote this quick article. After writing it, the Simple Staff List plugin served very well on the site in question for many years. We replaced it in 2023 by configuring Advanced Custom Fields on the site. This enabled us to dynamically connect with the fields that ACF created via our theme design builder Divi Theme. Ultimately this made future design and layout changes very easy (via Divi) and the data could continue to update via ACF. Both Divi Theme and ACF work best when you pay for a license. There is a free option available with ACF. If you are interested in getting help doing something similar please contact us!
In 2024, the company that created GS Team Members plugin in the WordPress plugin repository reached out. There solution free and paid seem viable as well. I believe a license is required, maybe a free one at minimum. One of the options that stands out with this is the addition of WordPress Blocks that can be utilized to help with the layout using what is now in 2024 WordPress’s own inherent ‘builder’ capabilities.
Original Article on Team Member Plugins
On any given day, we cycled through a lot of plugins. We have some go to plugins for most situations, but some specific situations require some special circumstances. When that happens we go play around with plugins in the WordPress repository or buy one somewhere else.
Here are a few Team Member, Company Employee list, Staff List plugins that we played with today. Honestly, we never found one that was the ideal, but we did find a couple ways to make one of these work on a current project.
We ultimately went with the Simple Staff List plugin. We needed simple and clean as possible, and something that was just as simple on the Admin side. What we didn’t need was something that emphasized profile pictures. Normally that would probably be top of the list, but in our current project it was just the opposite.
We viewed some other cool ones to note for future projects including:
Team Members
Our Team Showcase
TLP Team
We almost went with the Connections plugin. Its more of a full blown Business Directory plugin that can be used at a very basic level to only list employees. But the inability to customize the admin side of the plugin easily caused us to rule it out. Very clodgy admin look and feel, form happy… Still this is a very powerful plugin in many other circumstances especially for church sites. It just wasn’t the best fit today
Love to hear of any others that you have done something cool with as well.