Here's some documentation on how to use my component. For anybody wanting to test my component out without intalling it on a running Joomla! installation, I have set up a demo site at www.chantalbisso.com/demo. The login and password are demo/demo.

Field Manager

New Field

To create a new field for the contact info back-end form in the Contact Manager, click the "New" button in the Field Manager's toolbar. You will be sent to this page:

Once there just fill in the form and click "Save". The title field is mandatory in order to save the field and must not have the same title as an existing field. The position field in the form is linked to the position on the page in the front-end where the information will be displayed.

There are six different positions where the information may be displayed in the front-end. These positions are:

Contact Manager

New Contact

To create a new contact click the "New" button in the Contact Manager's toolbar. You will be sent to this page:

Once there just fill in the form and click "Save". In order to save the new contact, a name must be entered, at least one category must be selected and if there are fields in the information section with a star, they too must be entered.

It is possible to add a contact to multiple categories by selecting multiple categories in the categories list. Once saved it is possible to reorder the contact in each of the selected categories.

The fields that are in the information section are the fields created in the field manager.

For each fields created in the field manager, it is possible to decide to show or hide the field's information on the front-end. The contact page parameters control the fields in the contact information page and the contact list parameters control the fields to show in the two list layouts. This makes it possible to show different information depending on the layout.

Import Contacts

If you have a large number of contacts to add to the database, it is possible to add them all at once using the Import Contacts page.

There is two options for importing contacts. You may upload a csv file from the computer or if preferred copy and paste a csv file in the designated text box.

CSV files can be easily created from most of the spreadsheets software by just choosing save as csv when saving the file. In order to import the contacts correctly, the csv file must follow a certain standard. To make things simpler, I'll be explaining things using a spreadsheet.

First off, each contact that will be saved in the database has it's own row. The first row though is the title row where the contact's fields titles will be inserted in separate columns. The columns can be placed in any order as long as the title used are the same as what the component uses. There are columns that are fixed and can't be changed and others that are customisable.

The fix columns are name which is mandatory in order to be able to save the contacts, alias, published, user_id, access, categories which is also mandatory, params, showContactPage and showContactLists.

Here are the description of each column with their accepted values:

The custom columns are the fields created in the Field Manager. The title to use for these columns are the field's name in lowercase and underlines replacing spaces. If the field's parameter is specified as "required" then the column is mandatory.

In any case, when the fields are not mandatory, and that the columns does not exist in the file or that the value has been left empty then the default value is saved in the database.

Spreadsheet example:

CSV file example:

name,alias,published,user_id,access,categories,email,address,web_site,showContactPage,showContactLists,params

Manon Salty,,y,,p,34|37,salty@myblog.com,"2345, Fashion Street",,,email=n|address=y|web_site=y,show_name=1|

show_name_directory=1|show_email_form=1|email_form_pos=right|email_form_access=0|email_description=|

show_email_copy=1|banned_email=|banned_subject=|show_name=1|show_name_directory=1|show_email_form=1|

email_form_pos=right|email_form_access=0|email_description=|show_email_copy=1|banned_email=|banned_subject=|

banned_text=|show_captcha=1|validate_email_form=1|banned_text=|show_captcha=1|validate_email_form=1

John Fish,fish-john,n,63,r,35,john_fish@hola.com,"854, 5th avenue",www.commeread.com,email=n|address=y|web_site=y

Menu Item Manager

New Menu Item

To create a new link in the menu to the contact directory component, click on the "New" button in the Menu Item Manager toolbar. You will then be sent to this page:

Select one of the views under Contact Directory and fill in the form and save.