Blog

Some people have one physical address and one Twitter account. Others have multiple addresses, no Twitter at all and one Quora account. It's hard to take all use cases into account, but we want to let users organize their contacts the way they want it.

A physical address, a Twitter account,... we call all these ways of contacting someone a contact field.

Starting now, you can add as many contact fields per contact as you want. Previously you could only have 5 pre-defined fields.

Each contact field has a type: it can be an email, a Facebook account, a fax number. Each account comes with 6 generic contact field types:

• Email
• Phone number
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Whatsapp
• Telegram

You can add or remove contact field types on your account at your leisure, and set their names as you want, in the new Personalization tab under Settings.

Each contact field type can also have a protocol associated with it. A protocol is what the browser should do when you click on a contact field. For instance, for a phone number, the tel: protocol will tell the browser to launch the software that you use on your computer to make phone calls.

The API has been updated to support those two new concepts (contact fields and contact field types).

We've also reordered a little bit the sidebar when viewing a contact. Information about the partners and children are now at the top of the sidebar, as I believe this is a much more important information that knowing the address of the contact for instance.

These changes are in the version 1.1.0 which is already in production, and as always, you can install it on a server that you own.

Enjoy!

Monica is finally ready for v1.0.0.

We try to follow the SemVer approach here at Monica. Changing a major version number indicates major API changes. This is why I'm really excited to announce the release of v1.0.0. It adds a lot of features and will serve as a foundation for all the great things I'm planning to ship in the coming months. Let's talk first about the features, then the technical changes that are introduced in this version.

API

Monica finally has an API. Not everything is available right now through the API, but most of the data about contacts are. A future version will bring all the Settings and Account data as well. My goal is that everything is available through the API. We do support Oauth 2.0 and personal tokens. Under the hood, Laravel Passport deals with everything Oauth.

Nothing can help developers jump in a project more than a good documentation. This is why we've also released a new documentation portal that tries to be as exhaustive as possible. On each page, we also indicate the date of last update, so you know how fresh the documentation is.

It's going to be up to the developers now to be creative in using Monica's data and do great things with it. On our end, we are working on the first official mobile application for Monica, both for Apple and Android, but you will have more details on this later this year.

How you've met someone (aka Introductions)

Monica's purpose is to help everyone remember important information about the ones you care about, privately and for your eyes only. Sometimes, when you do have a lot of contacts, it's hard to remember how and where you've met them. This is why you can indicate how you've met someone or if you've been introduced by another contact. You can even ask to be reminded of the anniversary of this encounter if you want.

Mark a contact as deceased

Sometimes life is unfair and people die. We've added the possibility to mark a contact as deceased, and indicate an optional date for this sad event. Moreover, you can be reminded of this event if you choose to. When a contact is marked as deceased, there is a small ⚰ next to the name of the contact throughout the application.

Speed up the Add contacts screen

Our goal is to help you achieve what you want as fast as possible. This is why we've added a small button on the Add contact screen to let you save the current contact and add another one right after this one. It'll save you precious seconds.

Big changes under the hood

For v1.0.0, we've upgraded the codebase to Laravel 5.5, in order to take advantage of the great Resources functionality introduced in this version for our API.

Thanks to @mauricew, we've also replaced the previous front end build system based on Gulp and Bower with mix, the default build system that ships with Laravel now. We've been able to remove lots of dependencies, clean up the code and more importantly, make sure that there won't be any conflicts of CSS and JS files in our pull requests in the future.

Final words

Version 1.0.0 is already in production, and as always, you can install it on a server that you own.

v1.0.0 has litteraly thousands of new lines of codes. It's the product of an healthy community. On a personal level, I feel really blessed that Monica helps so many people. Your continuous feedback helps me tremendously to continue working as hard as I can on this product. The upcoming months will be very busy: lots of new features, a mobile application and other surprises. The future will be bright for our community.

Enjoy!

I've been a bit less active on the communication side in the last 40 days. I'm also slower at responding to issues and merging pull requests. This is not a situation that I like, but it's difficult for me to change it in the next month or so. It'll get better though.

What the hell am I doing right now

I'm working as much as I can on the project. Every free hour that I have is invested on Monica. To reassure all the people who keep sending me emails about my commitment on the project and the fact that I won't let it die soon: I'm still extremely motivated about it as I was before and this is still a priority for me.

However I'm working at the moment on the API and making sure that it works like it should. I'm also building the documentation around it, because documentation has to be excellent in order for people to use the API. For these reasons, and also because this is still a side project at the moment until I find ways to make it my full-time job, I don't want to be distracted by the feedback, bugs or new features right now. As soon as the API will be done, I'll go back to answering to the community. Unfortunately, I simply don't have the physical time to do all the things I would like to do, and I need to focus extremely aggressively if I want to get things done.

What's next

In the coming days, a first draft of the API will be released - with new methods added after that.

Once the API is done, we need to focus on giving some love to the notion of activities done with your contacts. We should also make the dashboard more useful, and change the Journal so it becomes something actually useful. Also, we need to implement the Carddav protocol, although I'm unsure at this point how well it will integrate in the current stack.

I'm sure this project has an enormous potential. If you are a current user, I'm still looking for feedback and testimonials. Thanks for your help!

The most requested feature on Monica (since the last one) was the ability to designate an existing contact as a significant other or a child. With 0.6.3, this is now possible.

How does it work

When you add a significant other or a kid, you now have access to two new things:

• You can either create a partial contact, or a real contact when adding this new person. A partial contact is the old way of doing things: those contacts are not listed in the list of contacts, and you can't add specific reminders or notes about them. A "real" contact will actually create a new contact entry for this person, and you will be able to add their own children or significant others to them.

• Instead of creating a new contact, you can simply link an existing contact to be a kid or a significant other of this contact.

This change was the biggest change in the codebase so far, and the one that took the most time. For the ones who host Monica themselves, be careful when updating your instance - make sure you backup the database before upgrading.

Other important changes in this release

• For the ones who like polygamy, you can have more than one significant other per contact.
• New translations added: Italian, German. Thank you to the community for this.
• Add support for Markdown on the Notes and the Log calls. This will let you use lists, for instance.
• We now support all the currencies in the world.
• A lot of bug fixes as well as some security bugfixes.
• We've started to use Tachyons as a new CSS framework. This will gradually replace Bootstrap.

Final words

Version 0.6.3 is already in production, and as always, you can install it on a server that you own.

Enjoy!

We've just reached an amazing milestone.

This is amazing and a great milestone that I'd like to share with you all. Users have uploaded more than 50 000 contacts on Monica so far, and it keeps growing every day. This doesn't include the instances that have been downloaded and installed on their own servers.

On a personal note, I'm amazed by the community around the project. On GitHub, we've received over 200 pull requests from the community and people seem to share the project all around Internet to spread the good news.

I can wait to see where we'll be one year from now. Thank you all for your trust.

If you install Monica on a server that you own, chances are that you will want to be aware when a new version is available. With Monica 0.5.0, this is exactly what you get.

How does this work

In short, your Monica instance will send a daily ping to https://version.monicahq.com. The ping contains three information:

• a UUID: the unique, anonymous identifier of your instance.
• the current version of your instance
• the number of contacts in your instance.

The last information is used to know the size of the instances of the people who download Monica. I need to know this information (and only this information) so I can move forward with better knowledge of how people use Monica. Also, there is no way to know who you are: the UUID is random, unique and anonymous.

The code of https://version.monicahq.com is open-source, stored on GitHub like everything we do.

In return of this call, you will get a JSON with:

• if a new version is available as a boolean,
• what is the latest version available,
• all the release notes for each release that has been made since the version of the ping,
• the number of versions available since the version of the ping.

This information will be used in the UI. In the footer, a new link will appear if a new version is available. If you click on this link, a popup will appear, with the release notes of the new version.

How to disable this feature

Every feature that changes how Monica fundamentaly works can be disabled, and this feature is no different. If you want to disable sending any information to https://version.monicahq.com, simply add the following to your .env file:

• CHECK_VERSION=false

And that's it. No information will ever leave your server. The drawback is that you won't be able to be automatically alerted when a new release is available.

Search your contacts

You can now search your contacts with a new search box in the header. The search will look at the following information in your contacts:

• First and last name
• Email
• Street
• City
• Postal code
• Province
• Food preferencies
• Job
• Company

Searches should be pretty fast too. We are super excited about this feature.

Final words

Version 0.5.0 is already in production, and as always, you can install it on a server that you own.

Enjoy!

Keeping track of what you said to the people you care about is important. It was already possible to store notes about your contacts. Now you can also log a phone call, which will be super convenient to know when you last called someone and what you talked about during this call.

Version 0.4.0 is already in production, and as always, you can install it on a server that you own.

Enjoy!

Note: this is a technical post.

After launching Monica on Hacker News, I received a lot of questions about why I chose to write the tool with PHP and Laravel in particular. I was actually surprised to receive so many questions about this topic because I consider that a language does not matter - only counts what you do with it.

In this post I'll share why I chose PHP and Laravel and the difficulties I had to overcome to build the first version of the product. This post is not meant to start a war between languages.

PHP has an interesting history. A lot of great web developers, who probably do not use PHP anymore, have learned the basics of programing with it. It was so simple to use and get started with, and while it wasn't an elegant language, it paved the way for making a career in web development. Then over time, PHP became less loved, to the point where it was almost shameful to use PHP or even say in meetups that your company was using it. Other languages, arguably more elegant, gain a lot of popularity (Python, Ruby) thanks to wonderful frameworks built upon them. At the same time, new PHP frameworks appeared. Symfony for instance. But Symfony was still hard to learn and use. And then PHP died. Or so that's what people said, ignoring apparently the fact that a lot of business was still using it and loving it. Then PHP 5.5 was created, followed by PHP 7, and a new framework with a weird name appeared, Laravel. And things changed entirely in people's mindset. PHP is still not as elegant as other popular languages, but things got a lot better. It became also fast.

But regardless of this, PHP is still the language people love to hate, especially on Hacker News. They say PHP is not scalable. This is probably why Facebook and Mailchimp, amongst other big names, use PHP today, at great scale.

Why this context in mind - why did I chose PHP and Laravel?

• PHP is simple to learn, and simple to use.
• There are a lot of PHP developers out there, and if people want to work with me on the project, there is a potential larger pool of PHP developers, at least from where I live, than Ruby or Python developers. Also, there are a lot of people on GitHub using PHP, and if I wanted this open source project to gain any traction, I had to write it in a language where people with different coding level skills could contribute easily.
• The most important thing to consider when choosing a technology stack for a new project, is how easy it'll be to maintain it on the long run. PHP is simple. It's easy to debug (although it could be better) and easy to scale (although it's not my concern right now at all).
• Laravel is by far the best PHP framework I've ever used. It makes it so easy to do complex things. It's clear that the framework has been created to start new web applications really quickly, and it's truly a pleasure to use. But Laravel's killer feature is the quality of the documentation, compared to other PHP frameworks or even a lot of frameworks in other languages. Everything is extremely well documented. I can't emphasize how important a good documentation is (this reminds me that I should document Monica even more).
• There is a huge community around PHP and Laravel in particular: Laracasts, Forge, Envoyer, a strong Slack community to name a few. If you need help, there is a lot of people out there ready to give a hand.

What are the challenges I faced during the development of this project?

Overall I didn't have that many challenges while developing the current version of Monica. It's not a complex application, and I don't have scaling challenges as the user base is quite small still (around 7800 users total and 4300 active). But there are some implementation details that I did wrong - not because it was bad coding practice, but because my technical skills were not good enough to overcome those problems on the short term. Hopefully, listing those mistakes will help others not make them - or nice people will send me emails on how I could have fixed them.

• In an earlier versions, I used a lot of events and listeners. While the concept is awesome, I had a lot of problems with unit testing the base classes because to them. Moreover, the more I was using them, the more magic happened behind the hood. I thought that people who would jump in the codebase would struggle to understand how come some stuff happened when an object was created for instance. In my mind events and listeners would make the application harder to understand, so I decided to remove them all (well, 99% of them, there is still two listeners that I need to get rid off).
• At the beginning, the database was entirely encrypted. For reasons I still haven't understood, from time to time there were bugs with the decryption process, leading to data I couldn't recover. Because I didn't want to deal with this problem at this stage, I decided to remove the encryption. Moreover, having data encrypted made it impossible to operate any kind of sorting or search in my queries, which could have been problematic on the long run. I'm sure there are solutions to these two problems but I wanted to focus on creating new features instead of fixing this single one problem.
• I didn't write unit tests before launching the application. This really hurt me bad. I don't think we should aim for 100% test coverage, but at least, have some kind of tests for the main features of your site. Otherwise you end up with a s**t ton of bugs that you didn't think about, and while you try to fix it, other parts of the application are affected by your fix. This becomes quickly a nightmare. Laravel makes unit testing super easy - I should have taken this more seriously. Starting with the next version of Laravel, no pull request will be merged unless there are unit tests and perhaps even functional tests.

Conclusion

These are some reasons why I chose Laravel. As I said at the beginning of this post, your project is not about the language. Unless your project is about learning a new language, you should not spend weeks choosing a language or framework. Stick with what you know, and just make something. Your users won't care that your code is ugly or that you chose Python over Ruby.

Only 5 days since v0.2.0 and yet another big release. So big that it required a new version for this.

When you have a lot of contacts in your account, you can now categorize your contacts with tag. Tags are like folders, but you can have multiple tags for one contact. This allows maximum flexibility to manage contacts the way you want it to do.

Tags can be entered right below the contact name.

Once contacts have tags, you can see them on the contact list, and click on them to filter the list.

Finally, you can delete tags either on the contact view, or in a new Settings panel created for this purpose.

Version 0.3.0 is already in production, and as always, you can install it on a server that you own.

Enjoy!

One of the biggest feature request is the ability to import contacts from Google. Google allows to export data about your contacts in the vCard format, which is the universal standard for exchanging contact information. Monica 0.2.0 adds the ability to import your data from a vCard file (either .vcard or .vcf), so you can populate your account with most of your data instead of having to add your friends one by one.

Right after your contacts are imported, you are redirected to a dashboard where you can see the status of the import. Because users might have thousands of contacts, Monica imports them asynchronously. You'll have to wait a bit before all the contacts are imported.

You can click on a specific import to see what happened.

Also, we've added a feature to reset your account, which will be handy if you do import thousands of contacts and something goes wrong. Resetting an account deletes everything, except you.

Version 0.2.0 is already in production, and as always, you can install it on a server that you own.

Enjoy!