Employment Opportunities - Suggestions?

[chead]

One of the sites I developed has an "Employment Opportunities" section with current openings listed. Right now, each listing is simply copied from a Word document, pasted into a new page as plain text and formatted within CMSMS.

After updating a few listings recently, I was wondering if there is a better or easier way to publish the information in a standardized format. There are only about 10 fields (job description, work experience, etc.), and usually not more than 5 openings active at any given time. So, there's not much to it and it may not be worth a module or anything more than what we're doing now. I'm just curious what others have done or would recommend. There are a lot of modules I haven't experimented with, and I'm still picking up tips and tricks.

I could add some custom content blocks to a "job_listing" page template. I could implement it in FormBrowser, though it looks like setting up the formatting templates would take a bit of time, perhaps more than it's worth.

Any recommendations? "Just leave it as a page" is a valid suggestion.

Thanks.

[Nullig]

I think the FormBuilder/Browser modules would work well here and they are fairly easy yo use.

Nullig

[Elijah Lofgren]

One of the sites I developed has an "Employment Opportunities" section with current openings listed. Right now, each listing is simply copied from a Word document, pasted into a new page as plain text and formatted within CMSMS.

After updating a few listings recently, I was wondering if there is a better or easier way to publish the information in a standardized format. There are only about 10 fields (job description, work experience, etc.), and usually not more than 5 openings active at any given time. So, there's not much to it and it may not be worth a module or anything more than what we're doing now. I'm just curious what others have done or would recommend. There are a lot of modules I haven't experimented with, and I'm still picking up tips and tricks.

I could add some custom content blocks to a "job_listing" page template. I could implement it in FormBrowser, though it looks like setting up the formatting templates would take a bit of time, perhaps more than it's worth.

Any recommendations? "Just leave it as a page" is a valid suggestion.

Thanks.

This sounds like the perfect use for PageBlocks. I currently use PageBlocks for links and for tips.
It's basically unlimited in uses because it supports additional content fields (or blocks) using the same syntax for page templates.
You may want to give it a try.

Let me know if you need any help with it,

Elijah

[chead]

I took another look at FormBrowser and remembered that one of the reasons I hadn't used it was because the link to view a record in the list is hardwired in code as a magnifying glass icon -- silly though that reason is. I didn't want the icon, just a link on the text of a field -- in this case, the title of the open position. At the time, I didn't have enough experience to change that, and with only a few positions it wasn't critical. Looking with a more experienced eye, I can see now that it would be pretty easy to modify the code so all the formatting is contained in the template. I might do that.

Elijah, I had installed PageBlocks after seeing several discussions about it but haven't actually implemented it anywhere. I thought I undertstood its purpose in a broad sense; but now I'm not so sure. Can you summarize how it would work for something like this? I'm starting development for another site and am trying to learn more about some of the modules that I've not used before.

Thanks for the input!

[Elijah Lofgren]

Elijah, I had installed PageBlocks after seeing several discussions about it but haven't actually implemented it anywhere. I thought I undertstood its purpose in a broad sense; but now I'm not so sure. Can you summarize how it would work for something like this? I'm starting development for another site and am trying to learn more about some of the modules that I've not used before.

Thanks for the input!

What I would do is:

1. Create a "Employment Opportunities" page.
2. Go to Content » Page Blocks
3. Click on the templates tab.
4. Click "Add Template"
5. Paste in a template. Maybe something like this:

Code: Select all

<div id="{$alias}">
Job Title: {$title}
Work Experience required: {content block="WorkExperience"}
Detailed Description: {content block="DetailedDescription"}
Person to Contact: {content block="ContactPerson" oneline="true"}
This job posting was last modified: {$modified}
etc...
</div>

6. Go back to Content » Page Blocks
7. Next to your "Employment Opportunities" page click "Add Block".
8. Choose the template you added earlier and all the {content block="blockname"} will show up as input fields.
9. Repeat step 8 for each job.

I'm going to experiment with a new interface for PageBlock. I might make it a page content type and try using this: http://interface.eyecon.ro/demos/sort.html

We'll see if I get anywhere. 

Have a good day,

Elijah

Edit: Removed spaces from block names since spaces don't work.

[heatherfeuer]

Interesting.  That is probably about the only thing missing from CMSms that differentiates itself from most other CMSs.  One of the things that turned me off most of them was that a lot of the layout (the way modules and blocks were displayed and where) seemed to be fairly inflexible -- even the ones that use smarty-based templates (like Xoops).

I really, really like the easy versatility of CMSms, so if you were to do something like that, Elijah, please keep it very flexible and configurable.  That being said, your description of how it could be used to post job opportunities was like a light bulb coming on over my head! 

[Elijah Lofgren]

I really, really like the easy versatility of CMSms, so if you were to do something like that, Elijah, please keep it very flexible and configurable.  That being said, your description of how it could be used to post job opportunities was like a light bulb coming on over my head! 

I hope to do just that. I'll think I'll just make the 3 columns each have their own CSS style. And maybe have a configurable number of columns. I currently don't use columns at all (see: http://www.elijahlofgren.com/bookmarks/ ) but it might be useful.. We'll see. I just enjoy playing with AJAX.

[Elijah Lofgren]

I'm going to experiment with a new interface for PageBlock. I might make it a page content type and try using this: http://interface.eyecon.ro/demos/sort.html

We'll see if I get anywhere. 

Well, I've stopped my CMSMS fun for now and moved on to working on applications for the 2007 Google Summer of Code and 2 temp job sites. After that I need to work on homework.

Hopefully I can have more fun with PageBlocks in the summer.

Until then,

Elijah

[chead]

Hey, that's a neat trick! I hadn't made the connection with PageBlock templates.

Thanks!