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Contact Directory
Written by Chantal Bisson   

Some time has past since my last post and probably many of you are impatient to know what has been going on with my project.

Midterm was from July 7th to July 14th and I am glad to say that I have passed and still working very hard on the contact/directory component.

My project has been progressing at a good pace. I'm now displaying the contacts in three different "views". The first is the "Contact" view which displays a single contact’s information and an email form. The option of showing a captcha image to prevent spam has been added to the email form. Everything that is displayed on the page is customizable. It is possible to choose the position that each item is displayed in (even the email form), and also apply custom CSS formatting to those items.

The two other views that I worked on are the "Category" view which displays a list of contacts from a single category and the "Categories" view that displays a list of all contacts. In order to facilitate the search for a specific contact, I have implemented two type of filtering in these views. The first is an alphabet filter that searches the first letter of the contact's name, and the second is a search box filter that searches the sequence of letters anywhere in the contact's name. Like for the "contact" view, it is possible to choose which fields to show or hide and once again it is possible to apply custom CSS formatting to the fields.

There are other smaller functionalities that I have implemented in the component. You are welcome to try my component out and test them for yourself by downloading my code from the joomlacode website. You are also free to report any bug that you find to me so that I may fix them.

http://joomlacode.org/gf/project/gsoc2008/scmsvn/?action=browse&path=%2FJContactMiniWeb%2F

Even though it might seem that my project is coming to completion. I still have many small things I need to do before it is finished. In the coming week I am planning to work on the router.php file that parses the joomla url into a clean url, the language files and the install file.

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7 Comments

  1. avatar Omar Ramos makes this comment

    Mon 21 Jul 2008 21:37:56 EDT

    Glad to hear that the project is still underway! Here at work I was just thinking about something that would be very useful (and would go hand-in-hand with a contact component): a plugin that would allow you to display phone numbers (or any other portion of a contact records) and subsets of the Contact Directory on other pages of the website (so that you can embed a mini contact page at the end of an article or other page). My work today involved collecting all of the phone numbers currently in use on our website, and since we do not have a central contact location on our site, the numbers are all over the place.

  2. avatar Omar Ramos makes this comment

    Mon 21 Jul 2008 21:38:42 EDT

    Sorry, my full comment was too long, here's the rest: By using a contact directory, and a plugin like the one I just described, it'd be a lot easier to keep from repeating the same phone numbers throughout the content (in the end, if the phone number changed, all you'd have to do is change it in the directory, and then all of the other numbers would change automatically). Oh, and it looks like you copied and pasted your post from Microsoft Word (the extra HTML markup kind of messes up the stylesheet for this page). Keep up the good work!

  3. avatar jared makes this comment

    Tue 22 Jul 2008 21:44:18 EDT

    I would still like to see a blog view that lists contacts from a category with their informaion stacked vertically like a blog. This is very useful for "about us" pages

  4. avatar soup a loignon y crouton makes this comment

    Wed 23 Jul 2008 23:20:21 EDT

    hello looked at the svn code. looks very clean. a few more validation of the data before the store would be necessary i think but nothing major can t wait to get a package and test it

  5. avatar Stefano Cazzani makes this comment

    Thu 24 Jul 2008 11:50:23 EDT

    I am not a developer but I would be keen to help testing this new componente on a real project. Sorry for the possibile silly question. How do I install it? I don't see any ZIP file and I am not familiar with SVN.

  6. avatar Chantal Bisson makes this comment

    Fri 25 Jul 2008 01:06:14 EDT

    I don't have an install file made yet so you will need to install it manually for now. To do so you will need to download the code and copy the admin part in the administrator folder of your Joomla! installation and the site part in the component folder of the installation. Then copy the sql script and execute it in your MySQL database.

  7. avatar Per makes this comment

    Thu 31 Jul 2008 13:49:05 EDT

    This all looks like awesome work Chantal =) I think it will be a very useful component. I haven't tried it yet (because I'm lazy, I will wait until there is a package ;-), but I'm sure I will like it. One question I have though: How are your plans on LDAP integration running along? I think it would be so very awesome, but more importantly extremely useful to be able to keep a websites contact directory in sync with the company directory, and some magic LDAP-sync (or really just a database dump in to Joomla) would in my head accomplish that. I am keeping my fingers crossed you have something in store there.

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