Changes in ownCloud 6 Contacts
The most significant change in the Contacts app, is that it has been ported to the new App Framework, and that the backends for contacts and address books have been rewritten from scratch. This has several benefits but most are not immediately visible for the user:
- Mass deletion - e.g. deleting an entire address book - is much faster and less error prone.
- The problem with address books being cached should now finally be gone. Address books are fetched in one request each, and the method for determining whether it should be cached is more stable.
- It is now possible to add other backends than the default database backend. The first release will come with a Database and a Shared backend, plus a pre-release version of an LDAP backend made by @babelouest (Nicolas Mora).
- Many more unit tests have been written, so we will catch most regressions in the code base earlier.
Some of these features was there in previous versions, but have been ported to the new backend. Some new features have been backported to oC5.x.
The importing functionality has been simplified even more. In ownCloud 5 I tried to cramp all that was in ownCloud 4 into the very small space left in the settings area, which didn't turn up very well to say the least.
Now - if you have just one address book - you simply click on the 
[*] I mentioned VCF file in singular, because I've removed the option to import multiple files at one. It gave a cleaner UI, myself less code to maintain, plus it's sooo easy to combine multiple VCF files into one:
- Under *nix like environments (that includes OS X):
cat *.vcf > AllMyContacts.vcf - In a Windows command line (or whatever they call it):
for %f in (*.vcf) do type "%f" >> AllMyContacts.vcf
You can select X number of contacts to merge, and which contact to be the target for the merge. This functionality is not very sophisticated: There is no undo, you cannot select single properties, any available properties that doesn't exist in the target will be added and it still doesn't work for photos. I hope to be able to add that before the release though. Because of the beta like state, I have chosen to add an option not to remove the contacts that are not the target after a successful merge. I haven't experienced any disasters with it myself, though. https://github.com/owncloud/contacts/issues/66
Contacts can now be sorted by displayname/firstname lastname/lastname, firstname. https://github.com/owncloud/contacts/issues/63
https://github.com/owncloud/contacts/issues/97
Like there is a virtual group "All" to show all contacts, there is now a virtual group "Ungrouped" to show only contacts that are not in any groups. This makes it easier for the user to organize contacts. https://github.com/owncloud/contacts/issues/28