How best to achieve a couple of functionalities?

I’m a complete newbie to MODx and the forum, so please be gentle!

I’ve taken on the rather daunting task of running the web site for our big band and have used MODx to build a new site. I come from a content background (I’m a translator and copywriter), I’m not a web developer at all and my knowledge of HTML etc is strictly passive so, as you can imagine, it’s been quite hard work to learn a new CMS from anything but the content side (for instance it took me the best part of a day just to work out how to reverse the colours and indent sub-menus). I must give massive credit to Mary on codepad and her fabulous tutorials. I’ve had an awful lot of fun learning but I’ve reached the stage where my head is beginning to explode with information overload!

For our members area there are a couple of functionalities I want/need to include and, despite spending the last week or so hunting through the forums, I’m not quite sure how to go about what I want to achieve, and was wondering if anyone could point me in the right direction.

Functionality no 1:
I need to include some sort of address book for our band members (< 20) containing addresses and phone numbers, with e-mail links to individuals, to all the members of the various sections and to the whole band. Rather than just typing out all the info and using mailto links, is there any neat snippet I could use? At the moment I’ve just got a link to a PDF file and I’m sure I can do something more clever than that. I have all the info in Mac Address Book so some way of exporting that rather than having to retype everything would be great

Functionality no 2:
We need to list rehearsals and concerts online so that our members can just look them up in the members area. My predecessor, I believe, kept the information in a Filemaker database and uploaded it to the site he used. I’m open to any mechanism that achieves the goal of displaying the event name, date, time, venue and comments such as number and names of absentees/deps. I would need to have separate sections for concerts and rehearsals. I don’t particularly want to use a calendar as we’re mostly talking about one event a week. I tried one of the CSV snippets but for some reason I can’t fathom, it’s not recognising the csv file I uploaded.

Thanks a million in advance!

Will you want your band members to be able to log in to edit their information, or for some other reason? Use WebLoginPE, with a custom table to hold data that the MODx web user system doesn’t use, and use it in "user" mode to display the list. I’ve done this for one site that expects to have upwards of 200 people in the list, and while they aren’t using the login facility now they plan to do so in the future, so this way it’s already all set up for them. And I made a custom module for them to import a specifically formatted csv file into the database.

I’ve found a few OS X utilities to export the Mac address book to csv or other formats.
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/9312
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/21654/address-book-to-csv-exporter

The non-calendar sounds like a good candidate for DittoCal or something similar; each event has its own document and they get listed using Ditto.

A Google search came up with quite a lot of utilities to export Filemaker data into MySQL files suitable for importing into a MySQL database.

Quote from: sottwell at Dec 03, 2009, 02:39 PM

Will you want your band members to be able to log in to edit their information, or for some other reason? Use WebLoginPE, with a custom table to hold data that the MODx web user system doesn’t use, and use it in "user" mode to display the list. I’ve done this for one site that expects to have upwards of 200 people in the list, and while they aren’t using the login facility now they plan to do so in the future, so this way it’s already all set up for them. And I made a custom module for them to import a specifically formatted csv file into the database.

I’ve set up the ordinary WebLogin to make our members’ area private - within the area every member of the band can see everything. I don’t anticipate allowing band members to edit their own data; with fewer than 20 of us, I’d rather they simply e-mailed me e.g. any change of address, or address book details for a new member and deal with it myself. What I want to be able to do, though, is allow all members to see everyone else’s address, phone numbers and e-mail addresses, e.g. displayed as a table, alphabetically by section, and to allow them to click a single link to mail everyone in the band, to mail all the saxophones for example, or to send an e-mail to one individual member.

I’ve found a few OS X utilities to export the Mac address book to csv or other formats.
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/9312
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/21654/address-book-to-csv-exporter

Thanks!

The non-calendar sounds like a good candidate for DittoCal or something similar; each event has its own document and they get listed using Ditto.

You mean, quite literally, every rehearsal or concert is a separate document, showing venue, time and notes such as absences? I had a look at DittoCal and I’m not sure how it would work for exclusively future events? (Probably a case of pass me the thicky baton) And is it possible to use Ditto to show, for instance, all the content of the next document/event and just a headline/extract for all thereafter? Presumably yes, simply through the content of the summary field for the page? Sounds like it could be an elegant solution, especially as it’s a case of editing directly in MODx rather than offline and uploading, which I’d like to avoid if possible (otherwise why use a CMS?)

A Google search came up with quite a lot of utilities to export Filemaker data into MySQL files suitable for importing into a MySQL database.

As I don’t actually have Filemaker and my predecessor wants no more involvement in running the web site, I’m not exactly intent on using a Filemaker solution

If I can get it to work, I think GoogleEvents might be the answer to the event scheduling (but I’ve posted on the support thread for that snippet because I can’t get it to work )

I’m still looking for an easy way to run an address book with mail links

And is it possible to use Ditto to show, for instance, all the content of the next document/event and just a headline/extract for all thereafter?

You can do this by setting a different template chunk for the first item, and specifying it in the Ditto call as &tplFirst.

Re showing future events only, you could probably achieve what you need simply by setting an unpublish date on your event items. Ditto only displays published documents unless you specify &showPublishedOnly=`0`.

KP
(see http://www.pogwatch.com/ditto/ditto-templates-positional.html for more on positional templates)