Links to Participant Center

Kim Ethridge

A few questions.


1) When you include a link to the Participant Center in an autoresponder or coaching email, which of the following formats are you using:

../site/TRC/WalktheWatershed/General?fr_id=1110&pg=center

or

/site/UserLogin?NEXTURL=SPageServer?pagename=pc2_teamraiser_wtw&pc2_page=center&fr_id=1110 


2) Also, is there any way to take the user to a login form that's within the TeamRaiser wrapper?


3) It's my understanding that if you link from an email, for example, directly to a secure LO page (including TeamRaiser) the user's session will not be tracked if they move on to an unsecure section (LCMS) of the site. Usually, when we link to the unsecure URL (for us, chesapeake.cbf.org/) the site automatically redirects to the secure URL (secure.cbf.org/) BUT it does not do that for TeamRaiser links. Wondering if anyone is experiencing the same thing and/or has any insights.


Thanks!


Kim

Jeremy Reynolds

1. The latter, though I'd probably keep the event name in the URL Be sure to encode the URL string that follows the NEXTURL part.
   
    
2. Something like /site/UserLogin/WalkTheWatershed?NEXTURL=SPageServer?pagename=pc2_teamraiser_wtw&pc2_page=center&fr_id=1110&s_AffiliateSecCatId=____ will force a security category if the wrong page wrapper is loading. You can find the appropriate ID in by looking at the category's URL from LO admin > Setup > Security Categories.
   
    
3. We don't use LCRM, and I couldn't find the specific forum thread, but I recall Noah Cooper once said that LO will maintain sessions between secure/non-secure pages if you use a relative URL (e.g. ../site/foo?bar=baz). If you're coming from an LO webpage, you might also have success wrapping the absolute URL in a [[T2:___]] text processing tag (again, not sure if it works on LCRM or not).

In all cases, be wary of any T-tags or teamraiser-specific E/S-Tags links within emails. They're mostly fine in plaintext, but the Coaching/Campaigns' software chokes when it tries to process anchor tags for anything beyond [[S42:1234:fr-id]]. Several of the autoresponders will drop event-specific tags too.

Noah Cooper

You should never link directly to the PageBuilder page that contains a participant center. Instead, you should always link to a URL like /site/TRC?fr_id=1234&pg=center (or /site/TRSC?fr_id=1234&pg=center), and let TeamRaiser redirect to the PageBuilder page for you. Reason being that this URL will automatically detect if someone is logged in and redirect to the login page if not, it will set cookies that are needed by the participant center, and it will handle cases where the TeamRaiser is no longer open.


As you mentioned, Luminate Online will automatically redirect from the non-secure path to the secure path for those parts of the application that are secure. Historically, TeamRaiser pages like the event landing page, personal page, or team page were not secure. You can request to have this changed by Blackbaud, and make TeamRaiser pages secure, then non-secure TeamRaiser links will redirect accordingly. Additionally, when linking to the participant center, you should use /site/TRSC?fr_id=1234&pg=center as opposed to /site/TRC?fr_id=1234&pg=center. The former is secure while the latter is not.