How to find a site member

While it is easy to navigate through a Plone site once you learn the basics, it can be a little difficult at first. To help in learning the basics, this document describes how to find the page for a particular site member, or to list the members on the site who are willing to show up in member searches.

The process of finding a particular member is rather straight forward. The first step is to get to the member search screen. This is done by either clicking on the "Members" folder in the navigation portlet which is on the left side of the screen, or by clicking on the "site members" tab on the top of it. When you do this, you will see a search form, in which you can enter either a part of the user's login name, or by entering a part of the email address which they used when registering with the Plone site. You can also filter the results by when the user last logged into the site. Once you have entered your search criteria, you can click the "search" button at the bottom of the form, and you will be presented with a list of users which match the criteria that you entered. This list will have the portrait which the user added through their preferences form, along with their name. If there are more users than can be displayed on a single page, then multiple pages will be returned, and links to the next or previous page will be included towards the top of the search results. Clicking on their picture or name will take you to their page on the site.

At this point, you may be wondering how to see all the members of a Plone site. This is done by submitting the search without changing the default search parameters. However, on large sites, you may get so many matches that it makes it nearly impossible to find a given individual. For this reason, it is recommended that you always enter as much of a filter as possible.

Is it possible not to show up in a search? Yes, it is. If you go to yor personal preferences (select "my preferences" on your user bar, and then click "personal preferences"), you will see a toggle box labeled "Listed in searches". Unclicking this box will keep you from being listed in the searches by other members. However, folks will still be able to find your page on the site by following the links which are displayed when you have edited/created some content, and you will always show up in searches performed by a user with manager privileges.