Build a Member Directory Portal in Minutes with Knack’s Free Template

Introduction to Member Directory

Building a member directory is a great way to foster community engagement and provide a platform for users to connect. With Knack member directory template, you can build a fully customizable directory where members can actually log in, view profiles, and update their information. This no-code tool makes it easy for any community, whether a sports club or a business network, to establish a dynamic member directory. In this video tutorial, we’re gonna walk through the entirety of our member directory app and show you why it’s so great.

Installing the Member Directory Template

So inside of the member directory template web page here, you’ll see that there’s an option to click “Install this app” and add it to your Knack system. You can also go inside of your Knack system and select the member directory by finding that there. Now as you can see, all it makes for us here is a members and admin user role section. And then from there, it’s pretty much our job to go from scratch and build something that we’d like because the app is set up to have a member showcase and an admin view.

So I’m just gonna use this test information to show you. We didn’t have anything set up yet except for the members. Okay. Pretty much just that for all intents and purposes.

Defining User Roles and Access Levels

So what we’re gonna do is show you how to build out this a little bit to make it easier on yourself because I know it’s kind of daunting sometimes to make different systems. So we’ll begin by defining how members and admins interact with your directory, which is a pretty key critical first step for any membership-based app. Clear roles that users have ensure each person has the correct level of access. Proper configuration here prevents access to sensitive information, ensuring that admins can manage profiles while members only view or update their own profiles.

Setting Up Admin and Member Views

In order to add these different types of views, what we will need to do, as you can see, is make a system where on the pages, basically certain views are limited to certain roles. So if I stop this preview, you’ll see that on the admin level, there’s the ability to add team members, edit team members, view team members—stuff like that—but the view here is limited only to admins. So you can see there’s page permissions, right, where only admins are here. So I can edit this to change to be different people.

But let’s say, let me log in right here with an admin to show you the difference. Right? If I sign out of the member, just go with the admin, you’ll see that the admin is able to add team members. So if I add them, for example, I could say Jim Knack, jim@jimsbakery.com, jim@jimmy.com, put in a phone number in there, and then I can put birthdays if I’d like—stuff like that, their address, etc. Oh, I gotta add background info.

Jim is the best member of this system. Alright. So this allows you to basically let someone get in there. So if we go back to admin, you’ll see we got Jim Knack—the best person here, obviously.

Creating and Managing User Roles

Alright. And then once again, the members’ login is good to see other members, and also they have the ability to edit their own profile. Right? So if I press “Edit Profile,” you can see Janet Cochran is who I’m logged in as, so I can make edits to this. But say, for example, I wanted to make a new role, which is probably what a lot of people might need in their systems. I could call it “Manager.”

Alright. And I want the manager to do something that’s different from members. Now, obviously, I can add the same fields, right? Like name, email, password, phone number, and go through and go one by one and add the same ones. So that’s fine. And honestly, it’s probably easier, in my perspective, to just clone it by pressing “Copy” and then make a new table called “Managers.”

There are two ways to do it, so I figured I’d show you. Alright. I wanna have the same ones, so let’s just take those over. Alright.

Copy. It’s similar to what something would be called “duplicate” in other systems. And I’ll put the manager in between, so it’s like an in-between role. Now what I could do is I could add another login, right, so that it’s not just an admin login that’s able to add or edit team members.

So let’s copy this. So let’s do some manager login—is what this is gonna be called. So “Manager Login.” And the only people that will have access to this are, if I edit the page permissions, managers.

Now what are they gonna be able to do? They are going to be able to edit members—not add them, but just edit members. Say, that’s all I want them to be able to do. Okay.

Adding New User Logins

And in order to add user logins, we’re just gonna have to set one up. Alright. So I’m going to add a manager since there isn’t one right now. So I’m gonna just put my name: Dimitri Panigi, manager@test.com, exclamation point test1234.

See if that’s good enough for the password. Okay. Cool. So this is this right here.

So let’s go back into pages. Alright. And let’s log in. We log in here, and what do we have?

We do not have the ability to add members, but we have the ability to edit them as the manager. Okay. So we just made a new role. We can view this.

We can go back to that previous page real quick and click on this and make any edits to different members as needed. Now, I also wanna make sure that I change the name of what I duplicated out to “Manager.”

Come on, Manager. It’ll be the name here. But yes, this is essentially it. Right? Sure.

The tables don’t exist here, and you might be like, that’s weird. But the reason is we’re essentially just managing member access at this point. And if you want to add anything on top of it, you absolutely can. I just needed to show you that you need to be able to make adjustments to the view access of these different pages through the permissions settings inside of here.

Best Practices for Role Management

Alright. You don’t want to have too few or too many roles. It’s very important that you utilize this to its fullest extent. And obviously, when you get into the part where you are working in this, you don’t want to actually have the email admin@test.com and password test.com show up here. You’ll want to make the adjustments so that doesn’t actually show that in the future because this is essentially just showing you a test environment.

Conclusion and Next Steps

And we appreciate the fact that you bear with us whenever we show that. I just want you to know that that’s not actually what’s going to be needed. Right? You’re gonna have to actually make some adjustments to the view here, and everybody is going to need to log in with their own account in order for it to work right. So it’s pretty simple. All you need to do is make sure if you’re the person who’s in charge of this system, allow for the right people to get access, invite them to the system, and then from there, they’ll do their own specific roles. So if you like this video and want to learn more about how to use our different templates, I definitely recommend you hit that like button and subscribe.

We have a lot more templates here at Knack that we’d love for you to try out. And if you’re trying to build a member directory, please try out Knack today.

So simple and easy, and we appreciate the time you spent with us here today. Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you in the next one.