iGoogle Gadget

I finaly got the iGoogle Gadget up and running. 

2008

Happy new year out there.

I apologize for the few posts these days, there will be more in the coming days.

PluginBase Interface

There you go the promised Interface for Plugins. There is no guarantee that it will stay like this

Soon there will be a working Frontend where you can register and see some of these in action. For securiy reasons I will not enable plugin installation. To test that you will need to download and deploy ContactR on one of your machines, but don’t worry a shorthand instruction on how to do this will follow soon to. If some of you experience some difficulties or have some ideas what is missing give me a hint in the comments.

So long…

- - -

EDIT: Listing is now found here

Plugins!!!

The last two weeks I was working on the Database integration and…on a PluginManager.

I also Started a new Frontend. This time its getting modular and therefore customizable.

Right now the frontend is only able to login and logout but that will change with each plugin I (or everyone who wants) write(s).

Screenshots or example pages comming soon. I want to get some more functionality done first.

Now to the more interesting stuff…how do you write a plugin and what exactly can it do.

Writing a ContactR Plugin is easy, just write a class for your program stuff it in a php file and drop it into the functions folder of contactR. Furthermore there need to be a line added into an DB-Table. That sounds like an awful lot of work for deployment? No problem. The PluginManager soon is able to do that for you. Soon you only need to pack your plugin into a Zip-File and upload it with the webinterface. Then click activate in the administration view.

You see there WILL BE cake

I will post the interface for a Plugin the net days I want to do some fixes first. The biggest problem irght now is the integration into the design. I need to do a kind of anchor for marking the place where an output for an plugin should go. So one can specify where the output should go in the plugin itself.

Perhaps there could be a Designer for that. Like the one WordPress or blogger uses. It could just override the hardcoded position choosen by the plugin itself  with a value in the database.

Some Funcionality a Plugin need as far as I see right now:

• Administration View
• Configuration View
• The actual View (showing Output)
• The “Doing” of actions
• Installation/Uninstallation
• Updating (from a given server)
• Information (like Author, status, posible actions, …)

If you miss something write me a comment

So long.

Database Schema online

Finaly I finished the Database Schema.

I tried to achieve 3N to all relations (What is 3N? See Wikipedia).

Especially for the Taging schema I choose this approach, called “toxi”, because it is the most scalable and reliable I found. It might not be the fastest way to do this, but in future if there is a need for there could be a hybrid between toxi and the Mysqlicious approach with fulltext which is also used by del.icio.us. A Hybrid in that manner would start both strategies as individual queries and then uses first comes first serves.

To visualize the Database I installed SQL Designer on the sample Platform. You can find it here.

With this tool you can see the current DB Design and even Modify it. So if you have any proposals for improving the database design or find some major flaws you can post it as a comment here or just draw a picture with the tool

If there are some questions for using the tool visit the Website mentioned above or just write me an email or comment.

Please save it under a new keyword if you modify it so I can see all the different proposals. If some of you just don’t care and overwrite it anyways, you others dont fear:

If there are some problems (like someone deleted or overwrote the Schema) or the Database has changed but you still want to see or improve the Database Design, here is a XML file with which you can recreate this version. Just click Import from XML in the SQL Designer and paste the XML data.

Don’t worry no matter what you do you won’t affect the real database in any way.

I also made an Snapshot for archiving reasons.

So long…

- - -

In case you wondered:

FK = Foreign Key

PK = Primary Key

Activity Ranking

Today ContactR also scored 57.89% Activity.

See it in the Forge.

The Complete Statistics were:

Activity Percentile: 57.89
Activity Ranking: 25.00
Register Date: 2007-11-21 21:56

I finally also completed the data on the forge and started the Task Tracking system as well as the source control.

-> https://forja.rediris.es/projects/csl2-contactr/ 

If you want to checkout the current version of Contactr (0.3.0.0) use this commandline:

svn checkout https://forja.rediris.es/svn/csl2-contactr

or if you prefer to download it as tar.gz file:

-> https://forja.rediris.es/snapshots.php?group_id=299 

Documentation 0.3.0.0

Hi out there,

today I uploaded the documentation so far and whilst I was doing that updated the documentation generation process.

Now that is done with a nice and sleek Makefile. The structure of the Makefile is very general.

If you want to autodocu you PHP files alá JDoc you can  use my Makefile. All you need to do is:

1. Install PHPDocumentor (ubunt: “sudo pear install PHPDocumentor”)

2. Adjust the  Macros in the Makefile

3. Run make doc

4. Enjoy!

Attached to this Post you will find the Makefile.

Development Status + Newest Version uploaded

So here comes the current status. For the ones which didn’t test ContactR yet, and the ones which want to test it again (username and pw changed):
- location: http://contacts.shdev.de/
- user: admin
- pw: 1234

In the actual version didn’t change too much, at least not noticable. I have moved the user handling into a MySQL Database and implemented an login/logoff mechanism provided by the phpUserClass.

Further I started the Database-Design for the rest of the data. Right now there is a XML-MySQL hybrid used.

But before I continue telling what is planned to implement here the current feature list:

Server:

• Login user
• Logoff user
• Register user with email for activation Link
• Activate user
• Remember User per Session
• Remember User per Cookie
• Load contact data from XML file
• Load contact data from LDIF file
• Load contact data from VCF file
• Save contact data to XML file
• Save contact data to LDIF file
• Save contact data to VCF file
• Create contact
• Read contact details
• Delete contact
• Read list of contacts
• Read list of groups
• Read relation between contacts and groups
• Interface for converter plugins
• User Roles not yet used

Client:

• Login user
• Logoff user
• Show list of groups
• Show list of contacts in current group
• Show list of contacts in all groups
• Remember user per Session
• Remember user per Cookie
• Import LDIF file
• Export LDIF file
• Create contact
• Show contact details
• Delete contact
• Refresh data on command
• Search incrementaly and instaneously in current contact list
• Show contact detail region
• Hide contact detail region

So far the features. If you find one I missed tell me

I promised to post the time line with the milestone for the feature as well as the approximated times for the milestones in the next days.  Of course there will be a complete feature list with all todos and dones.

So long…

Title Logo/Image

I’ve thought about the crappy Image on the Welcomepage.

It was a not to overthought gimp experiment. Basically y just wanted to do some shiny things.

I want to replace this with a few images with a little more message. It needs to say connect, contact, share, collaborate, mobil, of course it needs to look like fun. So what I’m looking for are a few picture like this:

- Smiling Woman looking on cellphone (you can see the screen of the phone)

- Laughing boy looking on PC (screen visible)

- Female student like girl sitting in a park with a laptop also…smiling/laughing/having fun (of course screen…you get the idea)

My plan is to connect these pictures with a kabel-like logo which then also becomes the ContactR logo. The pictures then cycle through so that always at least 2 are shown.

If some of you just happen to sit in front of any of these devices…why not smile into a camera at the same time?

Also, if some of you have more Ideas about on what devices somebody could possibly use ContactR, I’m happy for every thought.

So long…

Blog online

Hi to all of you out there.

I finally brought online the blog for ContactR. Here I will post news depending the development of ContactR.

If some of you are not sure what ContactR is or will be, here is the short description:

ContactR is a social Adressbook. That means you can manage your contacts, list your phone numbers, sort your emails or import and export them to and from clients like Thunderbird or Outlook. Furthermore you can use everything from your Handy, out of your Browser with the sleek websurface, as Gadget on your favorite Dashboard (e.g. iGoogle, Netvibes, …) or from your Windows Vista Sidebar.

It is developed for a contest in Spain called “II concurso de software libre“. I’m proud to participate with so many others. There is a list of participating project on the page of the contest (here)

I hope that explains it so far if there are more questions read the longer description in the forge, leave a comment or write an email to contactr@shdev.de.

Test Development Snapshot of ContactR: http://contacts.shdev.de