WP Contact Manager: The versatility of WordPress continues to amaze me. Design Canopy has released a theme/set of instructions for WordPress that would allow you to run a WordPress install as a taggable, searchable contact manager that can be made into a Members Only system and display related contacts. Now mind you, it is not a stand alone theme, needs extra plugins to be downloaded and installed and they outline detailed instructions on how to set it up. However, the setup looks relatively easy and the results are definitely pretty cool. I would have liked to see a Prologue like custom posting interface for logged in users but that could be an easy add on or plugin once the thing is set up.
Thanks for the write-up, Mark. I’ll look into your suggestion about the custom posting interface. Thanks again!
REally nice 🙂
Nice idea but are we infringing on any data protection act issues? I don’t know about the rest of the world but here in the UK we have to adhere to the data protection and freedom of information acts, which deal with how you store data – any data.
David, any idea when you might be publishing a new version with a custom posting interface? I want to implement this, but if this will be availabile soon I will wait for a new version. Thanks for the great theme!
Not only have they added some great new functionality to WP, he also fixed the custom write panel to work with WP 2.3! Nice job! 🙂
Very very interesting, see here demo: http://people.thedesigncanopy.com/
oh!
@Darren that’s a Europe law and at Germany there is a new law since 2008 –“data store safety” –I haven’t found a correct vocable in english.
If someone use this -at this time – in germany he would lost all his reputation-because there a so many protests about the new law.
I hope no of the very young wp users would like to use this -I hope for them.
regards
About the “custom posting interface”, you could use my plugin TDO Mini Forms which allows you to create a custom posting interface, rather than put together a new one. You could certainly have all the custom fields and post content you use orgainsed in one neat form.
I really like the concept behind “WordPress Contact Manager” and the way this is achieved by using several plugins. These plugins on there own are very useful but by combining individual functionality you can create really useful applications
Are you serious about this plug!? That’s amazing! I think I’ll definately look into this.
And what does it matter how you store data? This isn’t an illegal way to steal contacts or something … I would imagine that it would be akin to Outlook contacts .. only for multiple parties. How would this infringe on anyone’s rights? It’s not public – it’s a private system.
I really pinched myself when i saw wordpress script for the first time LOL its such a good script. Plugins make it more useful.
@Tadd – any system – private or not – can be hacked into. The Europe law is designed to protect someone who’s data has been stored by another person, sometimes without their knowledge or permission. For example, in this type of case (a contact manager), if someone had stored all of your contact information in it, then another person hacked it and sold all of your personal information to spammers and junk mailers, how would you feel? That’s the invasion of privacy that the law was designed to protect against.
All that being said, I think this is a terrific plugin/theme that may have other very useful benefits particularly if I run it on my own Mac’s web server app locally instead of at my hosted account, which would thus protect it from hacking.
Very handy theme/plugin. Well documented, too. It took me less than 30 minutes to get a fresh install of WP, the theme and all the plugins.
Well done.
It’s a very useful theme. I’d like to use it for an organization of students at university where I’m studying at.
Thanks
I think this plugin is not meant to be used on a public basis. But for a closed group of users it might be a cool solution.
The package (set of contributed scripts/templates) idea whereby you take a content node and turn it into something else has been done for years in open source systems like Drupal. Their ecommerce module is basically the same idea. Love seeing it developed in WordPress though, and I hope people take this in different interesting directions.
The one thing about this particular approach I don’t get — why use custom write panel instead of default custom fields?
Nice work, thank you, Mark
I’ve subscribed on RSS
First of all this is a really great plugin to manage almost anything from private contact list to shared ones in closed groups.
I agree to Tadd and Ro this is a simple contact management system even with the standard WP protection and does not sound illegal in any way.
And where installing on a local PC might sound as a good idea to prevent the “hackability”, well each PC which is connected to the internet and not running a Linux distribution is “hackable” in one or the other way. So this difference allone would not make any difference.
I have to agree that the documention is pretty good and the installation worked like a charme.
I think it could be very usefull not only to handle private contacts on the fly on several computers without having to synchonize them and without using gmail or something alike. But with a little tweaking it could be used as todo list, some kind of business card or even a calendar.
The third line on the plugin’s home page says:
“Note: WP Contact Manager is no longer being actively developed.”
For me, that means Do Not Install. Abandonware is never a good thing.