Little Black Book with WordPress 2.7
LBB (Little Black Book) is a simple address book plugin for WordPress. It’s based on Sam Wilson’s Addressbook 0.7 with changes to better suit US conventions and renamed so as not to interfere with that one.
You can view and edit addresses (names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, etc.) in the WordPress administration interface (under Manage > Little Black Book), or embed a read-only list of addresses in posts and/or pages by putting ~LBB~ wherever you want the list to appear. The list is shown in order of last name, first name. The replacement string is determined by the first parameter on line 377 if you would like to change it. The generated HTML is semantically marked-up, so you can fine-tune it’s appearance through your theme’s stylesheet. Here are the entries I use and a representative listing:
/*----:[ Little Black Book styles]:----*/
.timediff { color:red }
.name, .address, .homephone, .cellphone { font-family:"Courier New"; font-weight:bold; font-size:larger; }
.homephone { color:blue; }
.cellphone { color:green; }
.notes { font-family:Arial, sans-serif; font-size:smaller; }
Since my need was for a list of family contacts, all of whom are in the US, several of the field names have been changed and some new fields have been added, including an automatic timestamp. The default timestamp value, set on line 301, is assigned to new records. The current time is used whenever a record is updated. When the address list is shown in a page or post, the difference between the current time and the update timestamp is shown as a human time difference and colored according to age.
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Age
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Color
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Less than one week
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Red
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One to two weeks
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Maroon
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Two weeks to one month
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Green
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One to three months
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Blue
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Three to six months
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Navy
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Six months to one year
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Black
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More than one year
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display:none
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Installation
- Upload the “LBB” directory to the “/wp-content/plugins/” directory.
- Activate the plugin through the “Plugins” menu in WordPress.
Upgrading
Anytime the plugin is used and it detects a version number change, the install function runs, so there is no need to de-activate and then re-activate LBB to upgrade.
Download
The latest version is always available from the WordPress Plugin Repository.
Donate
If you feel so inclined, a donation in any amount would be greatly appreciated.
LBB History
Version 1.1.4 In listings, added a break after the email addresses to force a website address to a new line. (Requested by Aaron Patrick Michaud)
Version 1.1.3 adds “Cell: ” to cell phone numbers in the list. This was to aid in distinguishing them from land lines in black and white printed lists.
Version 1.1.2 changed the Edit and Delete link colors to improve their visibility further. (Thanks to John Marcotte.)
Version 1.1.1 was updated for WordPress version 2.5 by using a light grey background for the contact info area so that the white text of the Edit and Delete links became visible. The menu title changed from LBB to Little Black Book.
LBB with WordPress 2.5.1
36 responses so far ↓
1 Brian // Dec 10, 2007 at 2:20 pm
These are some nice changes.
Any chance of having a form so the users themselves can fill out their own info and it would be added? I’d love to be able to place the form on a page and have a user fill it out for themselves.
2 Jerry // Dec 10, 2007 at 2:49 pm
That’s a great idea. I’ll have to think about it. There is always the tradeoff between convenience and security: make it too easy and get overrun with spam or so secure that no one wants to bother with it.
3 Casey // Jan 8, 2008 at 8:12 am
This plugin is great! The only thing I would like to add is some pagination. (Limiting only 10 contacts per page)
Could you give me any idea on how to do that?
4 Pascal // Jan 12, 2008 at 2:46 am
I started with Addressbook from Sam Wilson.
In Addition I’m checking wp-members from Chad Butler.
I’m thinking of a function like Brian recomments.
Another way is a Sync-Function for the admin.
In case of a change by wp-members he gets an e-mail. After that he synchronise the fields with the usermeta-data.
Greatings from Germany…
5 Casey // Apr 23, 2008 at 6:10 am
Are you planning on supporting WP 2.5 for this plugin? There’s some admin functionality that’s not working quite right in 2.5. Thanks for a great plugin!
6 Jerry // Apr 23, 2008 at 8:05 am
Yes I am. I see that the Edit and Delete links only appear (in red) when the mouse cursor hovers over them. I haven’t tried to fix it yet because I have a bigger problem. I haven’t been able to get WordPress’s new Media Library to work and so cannot post pictures at the moment.
7 Casey // Apr 26, 2008 at 6:17 pm
Hello, I’ve tried upgrading the plugin, but when I try to re-activate the plugin I get the following error:
“Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error.”
Any ideas on what might be causing this? Thanks.
8 Jerry // Apr 26, 2008 at 7:41 pm
Yikes! I’m kind of a newbie using Subversion. I had a couple of different versions on my computer and uploaded the wrong one to the WordPress repository. It’s fixed now. Sorry about that and thanks for letting me know!
9 Casey // Apr 27, 2008 at 11:34 am
That fixed it! Thanks Jerry!
10 Casey // Apr 29, 2008 at 2:27 pm
Great plugin! A couple of things that would make this even better:
1)Being able to upload photos of contacts to display in LBB
2)Adding Pagination so that if you have a lot of contacts it will split up the results into pages of 10 (or whatever the desired number).
Thanks!
11 baron // May 13, 2008 at 10:03 am
hi. Thanks for plugin
perfect.
regards
12 John Marcotte // Jun 26, 2008 at 10:04 am
I was also running into the “invisible edit buttons” problem with WordPress 2.5 and LBB 1.1.1.
I added these two lines of CSS to the plugin code and the buttons are back:
div#contact-info a {color:#2583AD}
div#contact-info a:hover {color:#D54E21}
13 Brad // Oct 2, 2008 at 6:52 am
I use the user-photo plugin to display author photos in posts. Is there any way to tie into that plugin to display user photos in the address book?
14 Stephen Butters // Nov 4, 2008 at 11:14 am
Excellent plugin! Small, simple, and straightforward.
Fairly easy to modify too – I ended up making a small change to add “Title” and “Organization” fields and it worked without a hitch. I can send along the modified code if you have any interest.
15 magidu // Feb 14, 2009 at 12:56 pm
Excellent plugin.
We would like to use this wonderful plugins.
It is compitable with wordpress 2.7?
regards,
magai
16 Jerry // Apr 6, 2009 at 9:57 am
I am interested in adding a search functionality to this, can somebody advise on how to best implement this?
thanks,
Jerry
17 Shelley // Apr 23, 2009 at 7:01 am
I’m not sure about how to best code it, but it would be the most useful if it generated querystrings so we could link directly to results output. This would let me do things like keyword people in departments and build a list of them.
18 mssmotorrd // May 3, 2009 at 5:41 am
It’s the first time I commented here and I must say you share us genuine, and quality information for bloggers! Good job.
p.s. You have a very good template for your blog. Where did you find it?
19 Dibson // Jun 18, 2009 at 7:52 am
Hey Jerry-
I’m using LBB, thanks for the plugin!
I made some modifications to it that you might be interested in including in it. I removed the escaping of the data when it’s inserted/updated in the database (the $wpdb object does this already, which causes double escaping and then you get backslashes in the HTML output).
Also, in the filter I do a check for “~LBB~” before performing the database query. I think this could probably still be done more elegantly, but at least the LBB table doesn’t have to get queried on every page load this way.
Thanks again, and hit me up with an email if you want to get my changes.
best,
dibson
20 mapes // Jun 23, 2009 at 6:21 pm
My LBB only has 7 entries in it. When I put the ~LBB~ code into a page it puts the addresses all the way down on the bottom. I then need to scroll down to see em. Any ideas?
21 Bob // Oct 18, 2009 at 6:00 pm
In a page I link to LBB.php and publish see
Chapter Address Book. In Website I am running: ( WordPress 2.8.4 …XP Pro…IE8 …LBB 1.1.3)
When I click on the linked LBB text I get the following error:
“Call to undefined function add-action() in line 29″
and sure enough FTPing on public-html/wp-content/lbb-little-black-book/LBB.php line 29
shows an ” add-action ” function in it.
It seems I mght have missed something somewhere. Can you offer some advice or tips?
Thanks Bob
22 Bob Bussard // Oct 19, 2009 at 7:56 am
Please ignore my previous e-mail. I now know that you were serious about embedded ~LBB~ versus plugin name LBB.
Reading the Readme is good, comprehension is vital. All is well with embeded page calls to my address book.
Bob
23 Bob Bussard // Nov 12, 2009 at 5:15 pm
Is there some way to use the plugin to manage two address books. I need to have a book of regulars members and a book of associate menbers. Club officers need to address each group seperately and some cases together. Linkable entry points to seperate strings would help, or just two seperate address books.
24 Jerry // Nov 15, 2009 at 7:14 pm
Afraid not. What you see is all there is. You should check out Connections It was originally based on this plugin but is much more flexible.
25 Joe // Dec 16, 2009 at 11:24 am
Any chance to have and import/export feature for those with address book lists already made in excel.
26 Aaron // Feb 23, 2010 at 10:08 am
Jerry, great plugin! The only thing I have have been having trouble with is sometimes on the output it will run the email address and the website together on the same line. Is there a way to manipulate this?
27 danny // Mar 5, 2010 at 8:47 am
coding newbie here. was wondering if there was a quick way to change the code to just make the first and last names bold? thanks!
dannygreer@gmail.com
28 Phillip // May 1, 2010 at 10:12 pm
Hello, I have two questions. 1) is there a way to set up a search capability (i.e. jump to the letter C for example). You mentioned Connections and that does it but it does not display at all in IE. It would also help for pagination. I noticed several asked about that so I thought I would check. 2) I noticed that this also does not display correctly in IE. In FF, it displays with line separators and in a nice format. In IE, the line separator is gone and it is somewhat jumbled together. Any ideas?
29 Jason // May 12, 2010 at 5:50 am
If i use this only in the admin area, will I have to be careful with any security issues. I don’t want information in LBB to show to the public.
30 Kervin // Jul 9, 2010 at 12:55 pm
I was wondering if anyone knew how to change the datatype of the notes section. It cuts off part of what I am saying because it cant handle the length of it. Any suggestions? I think I want it to be varchar instead of tinytext
please contact me at ksjones@kandjconsultus.com
31 Jon O'Keefe // Jul 15, 2010 at 10:39 pm
Seems there’s a problem with names that contain apostrophes. My name, for example, appears as “Jon O\’Keefe”
32 Jerry // Jul 17, 2010 at 12:25 pm
Use the character entity ’
33 Peter // Aug 10, 2010 at 9:14 am
Is there a way to change the admin level for editing LBB entries? I’d like a colleague to do this but not have access rights to the whole site.
34 Jerry // Aug 10, 2010 at 7:19 pm
Sorry, no. It may be possible by defining a custom role: see this WordPress article on Roles. Good luck!
35 Annette // Aug 29, 2010 at 5:59 am
Can I import CSV files into LBB
36 Jerry // Aug 29, 2010 at 9:47 am
Afraid not.
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