Can I tag contacts (com_contacts)?

(sorry if this shows up twice; I am not sure if the first submit worked...)


I had a look at your food&wine demo, and Custom Properties seems to be exactly the thing I was searching for! Just one question before I buy CP 2.0 (for joomla! 1.7):

In the CP feature list I read that content other than "main content" can be tagged and that I can "append tags to meta keywords". Does this apply to contacts (com_contacts), too?

To explain: I am building a new website for our alumni association. I am new to joomla, and I am struggling among others with the problem, that basic joomla! lets me add contacts to only one contact category. We have a quite large website with member's personal information, an online-journal, and a database of theses written by alumni of our university institute.

An example:
* Susanne is a member of our association: There will be a page showing all members' personal pages alphabetically (some 250+) (blog layout with thumbnail fotos for the "members" overview).

* She also is a member of the association's board: All board members are "normal" members, too. I solved this by giving the status "main contact" to her personal contact entry. (blog layout with thumbnail fotos for the "board" page.)

* She is the author of some articles in our online-journal: some authors are members, others are not. - There should be a page "authors" which shows only authors and their journal articles. (blog layout without fotos)

* She is the author of an MA and a PhD thesis: the contact category "theses" contains single entries for all theses written by members, but also many of not-members. # of theses: 600+ (overview of theses: table layout). There shall be pages with an overview of theses' by author name. The theses' pages also contain keywords about research topics and countries researched in.

* Susanne's personal page contains information about her CV, current profession, research topics (migration, intercultural education,...), countries she researched in (Syria, Persia,...), and languages she speaks (English, Arabic, Farsi,...).

Now the following would be wonderful:
* If I click the tag containing her name, all other information related to her will be shown. (I already did this by including the basic search-function, but tags would be more elegant.)
* If I click the country tag "Syria", all other information (articles - com_content, theses - com_contacts, member's pages - com_contacts) containing the tag will show.
* If I click the "language-spoken" tag "Farsi", all other pages (com_content or com_contact) will be shown.

Can I do this with Custom Properties?
I would greatly appreciate your response,
Gabi

To answer the question in the subject of the post:

Yes, we (very) recently made a content element connector for com_contact elements. It's being included within the next release of CP.

When the com_contact element is in use you'll be able to tag Contacts and retrieve them either with CpSearch or by clicking on a CPtag.

In the CP feature list I read that content other than "main content" can be tagged and that I can "append tags to meta keywords". Does this apply to contacts (com_contacts), too?

As of today, no, it doesn't. And when you are displaying the contact in single contact view, CPtags are neither printed nor appended to meta keywords. Com_contacts, unlike the vast majority of extensions, does not trigger content plugins. A dedicated user plugin is required to do that.

Can I do this with Custom Properties?

Apart from the issue with com_contact described above, I'd say yes, Custom Properties can do that.

Andrea, thank you very much for your answer.
When will the next version of CP be released?

Speaking of contacts .....

I made a new connector for one of the leading contacts components, quite popular with a great new 1.7 version, called "Contact Enhanced".

I've made the connector for com_contactenhanced (the ce_details table), but this isn't working for me in cptags.php, it doesn't seem to actually do the replacing.

// expression to search for
$regex = '/{cptags}/i';
// find all instances of {cptags} and put in $matches
preg_match_all($regex, $row->$textField, $matches);
$count = count($matches[0]);
if ($count) {
$row->$textField = preg_replace_callback($regex, array (
'plgContentCpTags',
'CpTags_replacer'
), $row->$textField);
echo "cptags replaced!";
}
break;

The "cptags replaced" does appear at the top of the page ... so it's being triggered, but ... I don't think that the CpTags_replacer is working very well. The "{cptags}" is removed from the textField, but it is not being replaced with the actual tags.

Top and Bottom don't work either.

Could you possibly have a quick look at my attached files and see where I've gone wrong?


The Assign Custom Properties does work perfectly in the back end, and the filter is perfect too.

Thanks Andrea!

I'll soon take a look at the new content element.
For your information: agreements have been taken with Contact Enhanced developers to improve compatibility between the two extensions.
I'm positive the problem will be solved in few days from now.

Thank you very much Andrea -- both the efforts of yourself and Douglas with Ideal are greatly appreciated.

We've used Custom Properties for the last few years and are very pleased with the way we can integrate it using the {cptags} custom locations in particular. It's indispensable for most of the sites we build and are extremely pleased you've updated to the 1.7 version -- especially since we've started making all our new sites with 1.7 -- good move Andrea!

It's a very natural combination to show tags on contacts -- the number of applications where this would be useful are limitless really, from staff management to sales staff, allowing end users to easily use Custom Properties to view all contacts within a given Custom Property.

Thanks so much!