I’m already hard at work on the next version of Connections and here’s the list of features and changes that I hope will be in the next version:
Features:
- Add an Overview page that will display the following widgets:
- Today’s Birthday’s
- Upcoming Birthday’s
- Today’s Anniversaries
- Upcoming Anniversaries
- Recently Added
- Recently Updated
- Awaiting Moderation
- Add ‘tabs’ to the Manage page for All | Pending (count) | Approved
- Add bulk actions to Approve or Unapprove entries.
- Add Approve and Unapprove to the entries action links.
- Add the category_in shortcode attribute. This will be an operational AND, meaning an entry must be in all the categories in order to be listed.
- Add the category_in_name shortcode attribute. This will be an operational AND, meaning an entry must be in all the categories in order to be listed.
- Add the exclude_category_name shortcode attribute. Use this to exclude categories based on their name.
Other:
- Add new role capability, add_entry_moderated. When users with this capability set entries will be set with the pending status.
- Update all queries to support the pending status.
- Remove the use of the download.vcard.php file that is being copied to the WP root during activation.
- Trigger upgrade to remove this file from previous installs.
- Trigger upgrade to toggle the ‘Public Entries’ setting so the correct role is assigned.
- Document the template tag getNameBlock()
- Add a template tag for the Contact Name based of the new template tag getNameBlock()
- Update the getImageBlock() methods to model after the getLogoBlock() template tag.
- Consolidate to a single code base and have the template tags call the corresponding image only.
- Fix bug where an ampersand will not let the category_name shortcode attribute function correctly.
- Currently when entries are added or updated the timezone offset time set in WP is use. This should actually be set to use time() and only apply the offset when displayed to the end user.
- The role settings should not reset during plugin activation.
- Template should sort by their name, not the directory name.
Hello Steve, we purchased Connections for a client and we were going to modify it to fit their needs but see that upcoming features for the next version include Search and Pagination which are exactly what we need… Any idea when the new release will be ready for download? Great product, look forward to hearing from you – best of luck.
It’ll probably be several months until I complete these features.
Just wondering if you have a rough ETA? I am building am looking to upgrade a christian website, and after this feature your plugin will have everything we need and more.
A rough ETA would be about 3 months.
For a couple of projects I’m working on this is just the thing I need – but the search function is very important! No pressure and all, that, and a donation would be forthcoming, but is it possible to give a clearer ETA?
All the best,
Noel
I have a higher ed. client using the plugin to manage the contact info that displays for departments and divisions. The faculty and staff includes a lot of native americans, for whom tribal affiliation is normally part of their contact info. It would be really helpful if your plugin included the ability to activate and “name” a few custom fields for situations like this. Any possibility of that happening?
@Noel Chidwick
Unfortunately I can not give a specific time frame when search will be added. If I added search now it would not work with the address, phone, email, website, social media and website fields do to the way the data is stored. So this has to be reconfigured and done so in a way that doesn’t break anyone’s install.
@Ray Gulick
Custom fields is a planned feature, sorry no ETA on it though.