[buddypress-trac] [BuddyPress] #3335: sync of profile between Wordpress and Buddypress

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#3335: sync of profile between Wordpress and Buddypress
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 Reporter:  worldfreenews  |       Owner:
     Type:  enhancement    |      Status:  new
 Priority:  normal         |   Milestone:  1.6
Component:  XProfile       |     Version:
 Severity:  normal         |  Resolution:
 Keywords:                 |
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Comment (by joevansteen):

 One last thought in terms of the whole synchronization issue. My 2 cents
 given the above post:

 What struck me in terms of design is that BP has a concept of "field
 number" (field ID) for each field in the xprofile data. This I thought was
 crucial. WP only has labels in usermeta, and the labels are made up by the
 site admin or the programmer. Some labels match from display label to
 usermeta key, some don't. (For example the 'bio' field mentioned in the
 text that opened this ticket is actually 'description' in the usermeta
 table.) When I looked at structuring a "synch" facility, to me that was a
 significant problem. Mapping "field ID" to a label in the other system is
 very squishy. What I was really looking for was the ability to map "field
 ID" to "field ID." That would have been a little more solid in my opinion.

 As it stands now, my tendency as an admin/developer would be to solve this
 issue by avoiding all WP usermeta to the extent that I could and bypass
 the whole synchronization issue. Don't use the WP "bio" or any other user
 fields except those that are in the base users table, or those which WP
 demands - i.e., the ones BP already synchronizes by default. All other
 user profile data should be built in BP only using xprofile. If an
 external system synch is required, it would be against the BP xprofile. If
 I wanted user profile data to be displayed on a non-BP display (for
 example if I wanted a 'bio' field to show on a blog or WP page), I'd
 probably use a plugin on the WP side to extract it from xprofile rather
 than maintain it directly in WP.

 IMHO, there is much higher data quality assurance when dealing with a
 single copy of data than when trying to do dynamic synchronization -
 especially with systems that don't support transaction logic against the
 multi-database updates that are required.

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Ticket URL: <https://buddypress.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/3335#comment:7>
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