Connections

A picture is worth a thousand words…

Due to the nice rainy Saturday we just had it left we me with no choice but to spend some nice quality time working on the plug-in. Take a look at this screen shot. Yep, not only will there be category support, they’ll also be hierarchical. Good stuff!

Connections Category Admin Page

Once I’ve completed the next release I think I’m going to switch focus for a month and start working on the Pro version of the plug-in. It’ll have two primary features. The first will CSV import/export and the second will be the removal of the donate links and powered by link.

Almost finished with adding support for the honorable pre/suffix, middle name and social media IDs for an entry. I need to update the output class and hCard and vCard support to include these additions.  I have the UI for the category page and the creation of the supporting tables upon activation complete. The entry form has received a little love. You can now add an unlimited number of addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, messenger IDs and social media IDs. This makes the form much shorter and more versatile by adding only the fields you need on demand.

Well, development has been good and happening at a fast pace. So far the next version will have more features and changes than any version prior. Some additional meta data is stored when adding/editing an entry. For example, previously only the last modified time stamp was stored. Now date added, add by and last edited by is being stored. With this data being collected and stored this will allow adding support for multi-user entry lists and moderation of additions/edits. The usermeta table is now being used to store user specific settings. Currently this only stores the filter state set in the admin. In the future I plan on using this to store the view state of the add entry form to allow, per user, hiding unneeded portions of the form. Speaking of the form, when adding an organization, you will now be able to store a contact name. I also added the honorable pre/suffice for an individual. Next up, adding a section to input social media ids. The big feature for the next release will be category (and possibly tag, that may come later) support. I was contemplating integrating with the WordPress category and tags but decided against it as one would categorize/tag an entry differently than posts. So the plan is to mimic WordPress’s implementation. Management will be identical. When adding an entry you will be able to select which categories an entry will be filed and add a comma separated list for tags. The only support for using categories in this version will be a shortcode filter attribute and a select drop down in the admin. Not sure where to take it from there, so I’ll see what type of requests I get.