timmyt development

A couple of months ago, I started to work on an address book plugin for MediaPortal. My goal was to easily import a variety of existing address books (MS Outlook, Thunderbird and so on) and display the addresses in MediaPortal. I am a happy Plaxo user for some years now and when I found out that Plaxo offers an API, I decided to create a MediaPortal plugin that synchronizes with a Plaxo account.

For those of you who have no clou what Plaxo is (I suppose there are some), Plaxo is a webservice that allows you to share data between different application and services, such as Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, Apple Address Book and many more. Your information are mirrored on a Plaxo server and all your application can access these information there. For example, I use Outlook at my office and at home. Thanks to Plaxo, I always have my contacts, my tasks and my notes synchronized between the two computers.

Now back to my plugin… Obviously, you need the get a Plaxo account. Check out the Plaxo website (http://www.plaxo.com) to find out if your favorite PIM application is supported. If yes, great! You just need to download the according tool and sync! Minutes later, all your infos are available in your Plaxo account. If your favorite PIM is not supported – bad luck You could still use my plugin but you’d have to enter all your addresses through the webfrontend of plaxo.

Now when you do have all your contacts in your Plaxo account, you’re ready to start with this plugin. Simply donwload and install the plugin and go to configuration to set up your account.

One more thing to say. Even though I talk about “synchronisation”, it’s actually just a one-way process. Everytime a sync is performed, the local database will be deleted and all your contacts will be reimported. And for now, this process is done manually through the configuration form only. Maybe in future, this procedure can be triggered from within the mediaportal gui or do even automatic syncs, but hey, this is just the first release… leave me some room for improvement here

Screenshots

Download

• MyContacts_0.2.0.zip (2008-03-14)

Intallation

• Just unpack the zip file and copy the folders “skin” and “plugins” to your MediaPortal root directoy (c:\program files\team mediaportal\mediaportal)
• Start MediaPortal configuration and activate the plugin
• Enter the configuration for this plugin (details see below)

Configuration

In the configuration form, enter your Plaxo username (email-address) and your password. Press save and hit the sync button. Depending on the number of contacts, this process takes a while, sometimes up to a minute, so be patient . You can also change the name of the plugin.

After a successful sync, you can browse your contacts from within the configuration form. Simple hit the “browse contacts” button and a very rudimental form shows your contacts. You can delete some contacts if you wish to (delete is just local, it won’t affect your contacts at Plaxo). Also you can see the field names of your contact details. For example, the “Mobile Phone” field in outlook is available in the “BusinessMobilePhone” field in Plaxo. You’ll probably need the field names if you personalize your views (see below).

The second part you can configure are the different views. Open the xml-file “plugins\Windows\MyContacts\mycontacts_structure.xml” and you’ll see a structure like this:




<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<MyContacts>
<settings>
<field name="bullet">- </field>
<field name="tab"> </field>
<field name="seperator">* * * * *</field>
</settings>
<section id="1" name="Home">
<line>[FirstName] [LastName]</line>
<line>[HomeAddress]</line>
<line>[HomeAddress2]</line>
<line>[HomeAddress3]</line>
<line>[HomeZipCode] [HomeCity][tab][HomeCountry]</line>
<line>[seperator]</line>
<line>Phone:</line>
<line>[bullet]private:[tab][HomePhone]</line>
<line>[bullet]mobile:[tab][BusinessMobilePhone]</line>
<line>Email:</line>
<line>[bullet][PersonalEmail]</line>
<line>[seperator]</line>
<line>Skype:[tab][SkypeID]</line>
<line>URL:[tab][PersonalWebPage]</line>
</section>
<section id="2" name="Business">
<line>[FirstName] [LastName]</line>
<line>[JobTitle]</line>
<line>[seperator]</line>
<line>[Company]</line>
<line>[WorkAddress]</line>
<line>[WorkAddress2]</line>
<line>[WorkAddress3]</line>
<line>[WorkZipCode] [WorkCity][tab][WorkCountry]</line>
<line>[seperator]</line>
<line>Telefon:</line>
<line>[bullet][WorkPhone]</line>
<line>[bullet][WorkPhone2]</line>
<line>Fax:</line>
<line>[bullet][WorkFax]</line>
<line>[seperator]</line>
<line>Email:</line>
<line>[bullet][BusinessEmail]</line>
<line>[bullet][seperator]</line>
<line>URL:[tab][BusinessWebPage]</line>
</section>
<section id="3" name="Other">
<line>Nickname:[tab][NickName]</line>
<line>Birthday:[tab][Birthday]</line>
<line>[seperator]</line>
<line>Notes:</line>
<line>[Notes]</line>
</section>
</MyContacts>


As you can see, there are three different sections defined (you don’t have to stick to this, you can define just two or even 6 sections – up to you). All information that you define in one section are diplayed in a seperate window (see the screenshots). There are three settings (bullet, tab, seperator) that you can assign a personalized value to. All fields must be in square brackets []. The name of the sections (here Home, Business and Other) are variable and can be renamed. They’re displayed in MediaPortal as labels of the switch buttons.

So now you’re done with configuring, start MediaPortal have fun with your contacts!

Additional information
Photos
Maybe you’ll notice that some of your contacts have photos (in thumbnail view), but most of them probably don’t. Plaxo only shows photos of your contacts which are Plaxo members themself. Unfortunately Plaxo doesn’t allow you to manually assign photos to your contacts. So right now, the only way to get photos of everybody is to persuade them to become a Plaxo member.

Known bugs
Once you’ve entered your username/password in configuration form and hit the button “save”, you cannot alter them anymore. You’ll have to hit “clear” first and re-enter the values.

Limitations
Maybe you have more than one contact folder in Plaxo (that happens if you have several contact folders in MS Outlook). So far, only the “main” contact folder is synchronized. This feature may come with a future release.

Here’s the link to the thread in the MediaPortal forum where you’ll probably find some more information.