FastTrac: WebTrac Menu Customization
WebTrac Menu Customization
Table of Contents
Episode Summary
Join Brian Hatch as he reviews how you can customize your WebTrac menu for the new UI. This includes updating search links and going in-depth on how to use your URL to customize your searching capabilities.
Video
Transcript
In this video, we're going to talk about customizing the WebTrac menu in the new UI, or Next Gen UI. On my site here, I have an example menu. So in my case, the menu in the new UI is actually broken out into two kind of separate components, I have what was called the primary menu, which is what you set up on the left hand side. So typically, it's a home search option, which has your module level searches, and potentially some other options like contact us event calendar, and maybe potentially other customizations that you might make. The other component of the menu, which is new in the new UI is the My Account menu. So this is where we we broken out all the My Account functions for when you're actually logged in. So reprinting receipts, updating household info, anything to do with your account is going to be listed under the My Account section. So really two separate components that are now available. And we'll walk through kind of how to customize these different menu options. So by default, I have three modules listed in my menu. And they're basically generic menu links. So if I clicked on activity search, it's going to bring you to the activity search page, without any additional filtering. So This now brings me to potentially either all search results or brings me to no research results. And then I can apply some search criteria on the Screen to then find my results. And one of the things we'll walk through is how to kind of customize these to maybe make them more specifics. Rather than going with just the generic activity search for all activities. You know, we could really make those more specific, we could set one up for each major category of activities, so one for aquatics, one for fitness, or whatever the breakdown is for your activities in your programs and your structure. So how do we customize the menu, I'm going to switch over to my database here. And from the menu on the left, I'm just going to Type in the keyword of menu and the filter. And we'll be customizing the WebTrac menu in this case. So I'm going to WebTrac menu management. And when I open that up, most customers should see these three records, you could have more, it could be a different name under menu design. This is just happens to be what mine is called in this database. But the three components, this will typically break down into is your standard, your WebTrac default menu. And this is really what your current website or the old UI is running off of. So this is I guess your your standard that you're used to, you'll have the two new options below that that really represent the Menus that you use going forward and the new new UI or the Next Gen UI when you convert over. And the two components are the Next Gen for my my account. So that's that menu option on the right, and then the primary one for Next Gen, which is everything that we mentioned on the left hand side of my site. So we're going to focus on customizing the Next Gen primary at this point. So I'm just going to double Click or hit change at the bottom. So on the menu, Screen menu, update Screen, it's really it breaks down to a couple different areas in the middle area here. I have basically my current menu structure. So home, search, contact us, RSS, and an event calendar. So this structure is essentially what I should be seeing here at the top of my Screen on my WebTrac site. There's one difference there in my RSS option. If I Click on it here to displays in the middle part of the Screen, but I've actually been set, it's actually been set to hidden on the Field status on the right. So that's why we don't actually see it. That's a definitely acceptable way to kind of hide things, setting a Field status. In this case, I'm actually going to Click and drag it off to the left and release it and that'll remove that item altogether, assuming I don't need it or won't need it going forward. So now what you see is actually what you get in your in your menu structure. So in my case, I want to basically walk through kind of how to customize one of these modules search options. So under activity I currently have kind of my generic search options that many might have or again, it might be already customized to some extent, but have a generic activity search, childcare search, activity enrollment. So those were have always been a kind of our defaults over the years. Those are the three options by go back under search, I have those three options listed under activity. The difference between the three site activity search is going to come to the Screen that I'm on now it's going to allow you to kind of search through our activity, listings or catalog. The childcare search is going to be basically bring you to just childcare programs that are flagged for enroll by day. And the activity enrollment is kind of our older style of allowing activity enrollment. So if the customer actually knew the exact code or section, they could, they could utilize that. The problem is most customers don't know that the coding system and this is actually a little probably too tricky for most folks, I usually end up turning this off. And I would also probably turn off childcare search in most cases as well. So why don't we go through those two adjustments to start. So I'm going to take activity enrollment, knowing that it's that what it is now, I'm actually going to decide that I don't need that in my database. So I'm going to Click and drag that to the left, and release it. And I'm actually gonna do the same thing with childcare search. I'm going to Click and drag that to the left so now I'm left with my one option. And from here, we can kind of customize things as needed. So I'm going to walk through again, I don't have to this isn't required. Currently, this generic activity search again, will just bring you to, a generic activity search is just going to bring me to that search page without anything kind of set for me. But we'll walk through how to make this potentially more more specific and maybe slightly more user friendly. So I'm going to highlight activity search in the middle part of the Screen. And I'm going to Click on Advanced Field parameters on the right hand side. So this will open up the settings for all the settings for this one search Button that I have selected. So these are all the different fields are available, we're basically going to focus in on two of them here. So by default, the activity search is going to be passing typically these two parameters in the Button params Field. So the first part is my module. So I'm coming to the activity search or the search program, specifically programmed in this option to show me activity module only, which is standard. And that's what we would want. By default, it's showing the the detail display, so display equals detail. And if I wanted to kind of add to this, or maybe I can make it more specific, in my example here, I'm going to add an & symbol. And I'm going to pass another another search parameter make it more specific. So switching back to my website, under Type, so Type is my main classification for activities in my database that I've chose to use, it could be category, it could be some other search parameter in your case. But I'm going to highlight Type, or expand Type, Click on the Type I want. And I'm just going to hit search. I've highlighted aquatics and now getting an aquatics programs. What you can do or why you can actually do this as your starting point is you can actually look at the URL and the new UI and see what parameter is actually getting passed. So it's it's actually a longer path here because it's passing the difference in a lot of different search parameters. But ultimately, this Type piece here where it actually says Type equals aquatics. This is actually what we're going to be adding, in my case to my example, to my menu item, it's actually just going to copy it since I'm here, switch back to RecTrac. And while I could Type it in, I'm now just going to paste that in here. So I'm now adding a extra parameter here. So the module for activities displaying detail, which is pretty typical, and then the Type of aquatics. So by adding that, and this menu item is now going to be just a little bit more specific. And the Field label, if you're going to make these types of changes, you're gonna wait, you want to make that more specific as well. So I could just call this aquatics based on what I plugged in there. And those are the only two things I'm going to touch on this example. So I'll hit Save. Now if I go back to my website and just refresh the page, and when I go to search, so I now see that the labels have been updated for aquatics. And if I Click on that menu item, it's automatically kind of passing that search parameter into the way I can tell that is the Type box has expanded and aquatics is actually selected. I know actually got that piece right. In addition, the actual aquatics results are showing on the right so that's my other kind of indicator on this. So that's kind of one option again, it's basically cuts out a couple of steps for the customer, right if this is just a generic activity search, they can come to the Screen but then they have to look through the search criteria find the search result they want. Highlight the one aquatics in my case, s hit Search, and then get to these results. If we can make it that much easier to them just see aquatics and do search that with that method, it just a little bit more efficient, and probably a little bit more customer friendly. The trick with this is if you're going to do it, you're probably going to have to have more than one or two different menu items for the activity module, for example. So what you can do is you can really Build this out to as many options as you need. Again, there's at some point probably going to be a higher number that might not be that might make this not worth going through the effort. But in my case, I'm going to search generic on the left hand side. And it's automatically gonna pull up some generic options. So in my case, I want to add in a new generic Button. So if I want to make another one for fitness, for example, I'm going to just clicked and dragged Custom Button generic custom Button over in to my activity search group in the middle of Screen. And that's going to come over as just Custom Button Link. And what we can do, we now need to go update that with the same Type of parameters that the regular activity search as you will notice, the Screen didn't update with my new label for aquatics, you actually do have to hit the little refresh refresh option in the middle part of the Screen, and now it shows aquatics rather than activity search. But if I go back to Advanced Field parameters for my main option, I'm going to kind of cheat here, just copy this parameter here. So kind of copy that out. That'll make customizing my next menu option a little bit easier. So I'm going to Click on My Custom Button Link. And I'm going to Click on Advanced Field parameters on the right hand side. And now on that same Button parameters Field, I'm going to paste in my parameters from my previous option, and I'm going to basically just adjust the tail end of it. So in my case, I'm going to switch it to my other Type of program that I know I have, which is fitness. On the right hand side, I'm going to put in the Button program of search. So that doesn't automatically get added. So I know we want to go to the search program, passing these parameters. And then again, my label, so I might want to call this fitness based on the setup. So I can hit save, do a little refresh on the Screen, it's now I have two menu options in here. And I can do the same thing on the site, I can go to refresh my site, Click on Search. And I have two separate options. Again, if I want to test out my fitness one to make sure that works. I can see my results are different on the right in my Type box here. It's actually on fitness, rather than aquatic. So it is working. And I've just made two options in my menu that are getting more specific, and hopefully more useful and easier for the customer to use. And I could continue to Build those out, you know, if I need to make or 10 of them, the Screen just kind of continue to go down. And that might be a change that really might make sense for a lot of organizations. You might end up using different search criteria in those specific links. So Type was my example. And I know that's pretty common for other customers. But you might actually end up using categories. So I'm going to search by that just to point out the difference in the parameters right so by search by category of adult, you can see it's most of them are pretty self explanatory, but it's always good to double check. Now the parameter that you would pass if you are using Categories, category equals whatever the value is. You also might be doing keyword some customers do keyword searches. So it's a set aquatics keyword rather than the Type. So if that's how you have your option setup. You can see in the top by making that search again, kind of self explanatory, it's keyword equals aquatics. But again, it's always Good to double check. Now you can go add that parameter if that's the case for your setup, and your menu item. And you can make that these as specific as you as you want or need to. And it would be the exact same steps we focused in on activities in this example, it would be the exact same steps for the other modules. So you might want to do the same thing for facilities maybe have a specific menu link for pavilions or shelters or fields or rooms. Really just kind of breaking those out into whatever your your main categories are for items are available for searching and reserving on the web. And again, same concept for memberships rather than having a generic membership church. Maybe we make those a little bit more specific as well. And that's, again, it might make a lot of sense for a lot of customers to to go this route over the generic setup.
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