Plugin launch: hCard & vCard generator WordPress plugin. Available now!
Finally the day has come that I’ve launched a plugin!
Although, this isn’t my first plugin, not by a loooong way. But it’s the first plugin I’ve ever put up on the WordPress.org plugins repository for public download.
The hCard & vCard generator was born from the requirement of a business who wanted to be able to add users who have a downloadable vCard and display that in their sidebar when viewing that person’s profile. I took the idea and expanded on it slightly adding the ability to generate both hCard compatible data for display purposes and a downloadable vCard for importing into email programs.
As this was for a business I’ve left the code quite open ended. Plenty of room for expansion there to customize it to do exactly what you want for your project. Feel free to download the plugin either from WordPress.org or via GitHub. You’ll find links for both at the hCard & vCard generator plugin’s project page.
Love to know what you think, leave a comment below. Also, stay tuned as I’ll be releasing another new plugin soon (just waiting for my SVN repo from WordPress.org) and this one will have much broader appeal.
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I’m going to have a couple of questions on how you’re using add_action, but quite yet. Very nice, clean code, btw.
I’m getting an error when I add the widget or shortcode to my template.
Fatal error: Call to undefined function genCardFormat() in /home/envizion/public_html/wp-content/plugins/hcard-vcard-generator-wordpress-plugin/hcard-vcard-widget.php on line 38
Hi Kenneth,
Looks like you found a bug, I changed this plugin over from one I developed for a single website. In the process some function names got changed etc, looks like there’s some left overs from an old function call here.
I’m preparing another update for some other bug fixes so I’ll shoot you an email when it’s live on WP.org.
I got the update. Now I’m getting “ERROR: Please ensure the hCard/vCard generator plugin directory is writable”
I have set the permissions on that directory as writable and it still gives me that error.
Thanks!
Same problem as Keneth – any update/suggestions?
“Please ensure the hCard/vCard generator plugin directory is writable”
ok, figured that out – group permissions too – now I have another problem. my installation is http://www.domain.com/subdirectory/wp-content/….
the plugin assumes or is expecting the URL minus the ‘subdirectory”
Hi Scott,
Glad you figured out the permissions problem. As for the other one, it’s because you’re using a subdirectory for your WP installation which is totally legit, I just hadn’t factored that into this plugin at the time of creating it.
I’ve rolled out a new version this morning with this fix, plus a few other things people have been asking for. Hope that helps!
Great! Trying it out now. thanks
Ok, the vcard works perfectly now. A couple of other things:
It seems the ‘name’ is taken from the username, not the name fields. I mean, my username is ‘frank’ and that is what is shown in the vcard. It doesn’t show frank smith, which are the names I’ve filled in in ‘firstname’/'lastname’/'nickname’.
Also the hcard format is not very well laid out, let me try to describe how it looks …
title
photo
cell number
company
download vcard
it also says ‘cell’ but in the user screen, it’s called ‘mobile’
thanks!
ok, so it stripped the spacing out of my post. Image in the above post, cell number, company and download have about 20-30 spaces before them
title
photo
………………………..cell number
………………………..company
……………………………………download vcard
Hey Scott,
The name field (N) is taken from LastName; FirstName
The full name field (FN) is taken from the user’s DisplayName.
Some mailers and address books will just use the FN field in the vCard which may be why it’s not displaying as you’d like.
Re the layout, most people just hide the elements they don’t want via CSS. It’s all organised into DIVs so it should collapse. Otherwise if you look in hcard-vcard-generator.php line 65 you’ll see where the HTML is generated and can adjust as you need if it’s causing big problems.
Would you prefer it said Cell or Mobile? I know Americans call them Cell phones which doesn’t make much sense to me, but that’s why it’s in there because the standard said to call it a Cell number. I’d much prefer Mobile as it’s more universal terminology, but I can adjust it either way. Let me know what is preferred.