Recently, we found a need to create a connection campaign. This connection campaign however was going to utilize a large number of our volunteers.  Most of these volunteers did not have access to our Internal side of Rock.  So we created a way for our volunteers to access connections that were assigned to them from the external site.

In doing this, we used blocks already created and available to us in Core.

STEP 1

Create your new connection pages. These are the pages that your volunteers will use to access their connections.

  • Admin Tools > CMS Configuration > Pages

Navigate to your External Homepage and find a spot to build your new pages. We built our pages under Support Pages.

Here are the pages I built:

  • My Connections
  • Connection Request Detail (child page of My Connections)

Be sure to build them with the site: External Site

Note: Be sure to secure these pages. We created a security role just for those people who will be assigned external connections. So we secured both pages to that security role.

STEP 2

On the 'My Connections' page, I added one block: [ My Connection Opportunities Lava ]

Within the block properties, be sure to do two things:

  1. Select the 'Connection Request Detail' page you added above to the [ Detail Page ]
  2. Select only those 'Connection Types' that you would like available on this page.

Note: the file '~/Assets/Lava/MyConnectionOpportunitiesSortable.lava' is only available to your Internal Site. Follow the instructions below to make that file available on the external site.

  1. Log into your Rock Hosting Server and navigate to the Rock folder. Usually this is "C:\inetpub\wwwroot" or some variation thereof. You'll know you're in the right spot when you see folders named "App_Browsers, App_Code, App_Data" and so on...
  2. Navigate down through "Themes" and into your internal theme folder. Usually this is "Rock" and then through "Assets" and "Lava" (so you are now in "C:\inetpub\wwwroot\Themes\Rock\Assets\Lava" and you see a list of files.
  3. Right click on "MyConnectionOpportunitiesSortable.lava" and copy it to your clipboard.
  4. Navigate into your external theme folder now and go to the same location. If you are using the "Stark" theme for example, you'll go to "C:\inetpub\wwwroot\Themes\Stark\Assets\Lava" and paste the file you've copied into there.

STEP 3

On the 'Connection Request Detail' page, I added one block: [ Connection Request Detail ]

With the block properties, I did the two things:

1: Select Appropriate Pages

  • Left the Person Profile Page blank. (You could build your own external profile page I suppose... but we did not need our volunteers seeing any information not already available to them in the connection detail block.)
  • Select a Workflow Detail page available to you on your external site. (If you do not have one, you can build one by copying blocks from a workflow detail page already built on your internal site)
  • Select a Workflow Entry page available to you on your external site.
  • Select a Group Detail Page available to you on your external site.
  • Select a SMS Link Page available to you on your external site. (I used the Communication page)

2: Select Appropriate Badges

  • Select badges that make most sense to your volunteers. (We selected Connection Status and Campus)

We also found the need to remove the [Edit] and [Transfer] buttons from the Connection Detail Block. We had no reason for our volunteers to click edit or transfer the connection.  Therefore, we hid them. If you are interested in hiding those buttons, you can do the following.

From the block properties of the [ Connection Request Detail ] block, click [ Advanced Settings ]. Add this to the Pre-HTML section:

    <style>
    a[id$='lbTransfer'] {display: none !important;}
    a[id$='lbEdit'] {display: none !important;}
    </style>

STEP 4

Lastly, take a look at your CSS on that page and make any updates that help make the page look a bit more inviting for your volunteers! 

Hope this helps!!