By aireworth on

I've set up a couple of small Drupal sites already, and I'm helping set up an intranet at work (small professional services company). I want a page or pages of contact details for staff, suppliers and others we have regular contact with. I could just do it as a list on a page, but a better solution would be an "Address Book" or "Directory" module, where that individual entries could be added, altered and removed without editing the whole document. I spent all last evening searching for a module to do this task, but could find none. What am I missing? What do other people use?
Do I just have to roll my own with CCK and views?

Many thanks

Colin

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

gmak’s picture

gmak commented

Colin,

In my opinion, you have pointed to the solution yourself. CCK+Views will give you the flexibility to tailor your address book to your needs.

G

aireworth’s picture

aireworth commented

But I was hoping for an easier way. :-)) I've only briefly looked at CCK and Views, and I was kinda hoping I'd get this job done without recourse to them. But if I have to ..... I'd nothing to do on Saturday evening anyway....

Anybody got a better idea?

Colin

cehwitham’s picture

cehwitham commented

I to am looking for this kind of functionality but I've never looked at CCK and don't really have the time right now.

After a bit more looking, I've just found this, http://drupal.org/node/86165

Looks as though it may be helpful.

kekretzschmar’s picture

kekretzschmar commented

You use the table manager module also. Just create a new table, add the data, and then post it.

aireworth’s picture

aireworth commented

Well I did use CCK and views in the end. And it only took me the evening I had predicted. There are various cck addons which appear to give pre prepared fields - name, address, phone, post code etc, but I ended up using grouped text fields for the most. On my monitor and theme combination I couldn't see all the text in the cck name and cck address modules, and the phone no module gave me a sql access error.

I created a taxonomy vocabulary called contact with terms such as staff, supplier, partner, client, etc. Then used views to produce a table view. Filters with tabbed menu entries mean I can reduce the list to single 'contact' terms - looking only at 'staff' for example. The first term in this view was a link to the node. One of the beauties of the node display is that fields that are empty are not displayed. So I could have multiple fields for phone number, for example, and only those with content will be shown.

If you are going to use this approach, and use only one custom content type for all your contacts, then you may run into the quandary of what to use for the 'title' field. CCK insists you use it. If you are only going to be storing individuals names, the perhaps you could but the surname in this field, but this becomes a nonsense when listing a multinational company. Quite a few of our contacts are single person companies, so they would both have a name and a company name. I eventually made the cck title field "fullname or company name" with separate title, first and surname name fields as a group in the content type. As that was my biggest headache, you can tell this was a fairly trivial task.

Colin