[Peta]

Hello
I am testing Connections on one of my test sites.
One of the things I am looking for is a wordpress extension where I can enter contacts – with separate informaton for individuals or organisations, then link an individual to an organisation.

All was looking good with Connections. I entered two organisations, then an individual. Happily my list of two organisations came up and I chose one for my individual. Saved.

I decided to look at the database, via phpmyadmin, to see how the data is stored. I found one table, called “connections” which contained my three records. Okay, I thought, if the parenting is done correctly, that’s not a problem.

I was, however, very concerned to see the “organization” field containing text not the unique id of the organisation.

I decided to test this out by editing and slightly changing the name of the organisation I had linked to the individual. As I now strongly expected, the individual’s record still contained the unedited organisation name.

This is a fundamental flaw in your database design. If you want both organisations and individuals in the one table you could do it as below, which shows Jan Smith has the organization-id of 1, Blue Company. If someone changes the company name from “Blue Company” to “Dark Blue Company” it doesn’t matter as Jan still has organization-id 1 in her record – and those ids don’t change.

id entity-type first-name last-name organization-name organization-id
1 org Blue Company
2 org Red Company
3 indiv Jan Smith 1

I suggest you read up on the importance of foreign keys in robust database design.
What a disappointment! I was so hoping Connections would work for me. :(

[Steven Zahm]

@ Peta

The is no relation to a individual entry and an organization. If there were, yes, some sort of relationship such as foreign key would make sense. Connections is not intended to build a directory where individuals are “assigned” to organizations. Generally users simply use Connections and similar plugins to build business lists/directories or people directories of individual within their business organization.

I know what you are seeking to do and I’ve done many custom jobs which list people within an organization.

Here’s a free extension that helps with that:

https://github.com/Connections-Business-Directory/Entry-Organization

Download using the green button, install like any other plugin and activate.

Enter your organizations and then enter the individuals. When entering individuals you will only be able to select the previously entered when adding an organization to the entry.

Then you can customize templates and use any of the methods available within the addon plugin to get and output a list of people within an organization.

The addon is admittedly not a perfect solution and could be built out with more features to make it more broadly usable but it does do the job.

Hope this helps! Let me know.

[Author]

Posts