[buddypress-dev] Proposed BuddyPress feature: Favourites

[Chris Taylor - stillbreathing.co.uk]

Hi gang,

(Better let everyone know: I'm in the UK - well, the People's Republic
of Yorkshire - so my spelling of some words maybe a little strange!)

Everyone knows that people love to make lists. In several of the
popular social networking sites users can create lists of their
favourite books, movies or bands Thinking about that today I had an
idea - we could make that not just a feature, but a dynamic feature.
Here's the deal:

The BP admin installs the "Favourites" plugin and goes to set it up.
They decide they want people to be able to choose their favourite
books, movies and bands. They create those three new favourites
"types". For each of those types they have default fields (name,
rating, reason for choice) and a couple of configurable fields as well
(so they can enter artist for albums, author for books etc).

Users can then enter as many items as they want into each "type" -
books, movies etc - give them a rating etc. Their lists can appear
with a template tag on their profile favourites("books"). And if the
data is stored in a central table it should be easy to pull out global
top 10's, search favourites, see how often a certain book (or movie,
or cheese, or breed of dog) appears. The tables would be something
like (pseudo-SQL):

table wp_favourite_types (
id int,
title varchar(64),
slug varchar(64)
)

table wp_user_favourites (
id int,
user_id int,
favourite_type int,
title varchar(255),
rating smallint,
reason varchar(max),
field_1 varchar(max),
field_2 varchar(max),
field_3 varchar(max)
)

The power of this feature is it doesn't lock site admins down to only
getting a few types of the more usual favourites, but create their own
types if they want. So you want to see what everyone's favourite beer
is? No problem, just create the type "Beer". How about everyone's
favourite tree? Sorted.

Anyway, just an idea. What do people think?

Chris