Use Google Contacts

[los93sol]

After inputting all my contacts into my core it dawned on me that an easier way of doing this would be to add the ability to pull contacts in from Google Contacts like I do on my Mobile.  This gives me a backup of my contacts and means that whenever a change happens on my Mobile or Google the changes are automatically synced up in all places without ever having to manually edit them in more than one place.  It would be great to have LinuxMCE playing nicely with this so that all devices would be seamless.

[jimbodude]

I like it.

http://code.google.com/apis/contacts/docs/3.0/developers_guide.html

[Enigmus]

Wow, the tools are there, and this looks like it would be very useful.

[tschak909]

somebody take charge of this and do it.

-Thom

[los93sol]

Thom,

I'll give it a shot now that I'm getting more comfortable with LMCE codebase, but can you provide some implementation advice please?  I am only a beginner and haven't been able to look at the LMCE code to see how contacts are currently handled, but I imagine they are written to a database.  I'm thinking this should be relatively easy to implement since google has already provided some code to fetch all contacts and make edits from your own application so really I think I just need to tie this into LMCE's existing code for editing contacts, etc.  So basically as a start just fetch all contacts from Google and write them to the database through the web admin, then add the editing bits with a sync contacts button in the web admin to push any changes back to google.  Again, I haven't even looked at the existing LMCE code yet, but does that sound about right to you?

[tschak909]

Yes. We don't currently have THAT many fields in the pluto_telecom database for the Contact table, we just have a Contact table for the general contact info (name, company, etc.), and a Phonenumber table, for storing the individual phone numbers.

-Thom

[jimbodude]

If you do take this on - try to plan for the future.  Think about how your stuff could connect to other contact databases, or how it could accumulate contacts from multiple databases simultaneously.  Facebook comes to mind first.  A lot of the newer smartphones are starting to have this capability, so it's definitely something people will know about.

I'm not saying that such expandability should work in the first implementation, but don't do anything that would prohibit that sort of functionality down the road.

[tschak909]

just keep two words in mind, "simple" and "sane"

-Thom

[donpaul]

Please make sure it works with google apps as well. Lots of people overlook that as well.

[los93sol]

What do you mean make sure it works with google apps?  You mean edits on LMCE should push back to google contacts right?  Or are you referring to something else?

[mkbrown69]

What about looking at integrating an existing open-source project to handle contacts and syncing, like one of the groupware projects?  That could allow LinuxMCE to leverage work and technology that is constantly being developed for that purpose, and LinuxMCE would only need to be concerned with the integration.  I started a thread about Calendar/Groupware integration.

Hope that helps!

/Mike

[Che]

Man, I wish LMCE would just stop being so damned awesome!

[los93sol]

Sorry guys, I will come back to this, got wrapped up with other projects for a bit.  If someone else has the time now feel free to get a start on it, complete it, whatever, just please let me know if you're actively working on it so we don't duplicate efforts.

[Silverskull]

What do you mean make sure it works with google apps?  You mean edits on LinuxMCE should push back to google contacts right?  Or are you referring to something else?

As in... don't ask for an account that ends in @gmail.com.  Google apps users (such as myself) have accounts with custom domains.  That and people who choose not to create Gmail accounts and use their existing addresses instead.

Though edits on LinuxMCE definitely should push back to Google Contacts either way.

[los93sol]

Silverskull, feel free to dig into the code and get a jump on this