[buddypress-dev] info portability- theme options - friend's feeds - urls

[Chris Taylor - stillbreathing.co.uk]

Hi Steve,

Wow, loads of thoughts. Here's a few off-the-top-of-my-head comments:

On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 5:23 AM, Steve Bryan <djsteve007 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Recent friend activity could show a few items on the dashboard, with a
> second dashboard page showing more recent items with more friends. It would
> be nice to choose which items to keep an eye on with different friends -
> some you may want to know about new pics, some you may want to ignore
> bulletins and blog posts. I sure wish I could ignore one of my friends
> bulletin feeds on myspace.

Yes, the only problem is going to be the "privacy matrix" this
requires. We want to keep Buddypress as simple to use as Wordpress so
the technical barrier for entry is still low. Th current thinking is
that there will be different levels of administration, so maybe this
"I want to see this kind of update from this person, and that kind of
update from that person" could be in a power user area. It would be
pretty useful.

> Has there been any testing / consideration about urls? I know some plugins
> have had issues with sublog.wpmuinstall.com as opposed to
> wpmuinstall.com/sublog. I think a lot of users out there are use to
> http://myspace.com/mypage - and I have seen some issues out there with doing
> it that way. I'd like to launch one that way. my other wpmu's are the other
> way for now.

Maybe Andy has something to say on this, but as far as I know
Buddypress will work with both URI types.

> I am VERY glad that the thinking has evolved to include multiple theme
> options - will there be a wiki or something for documenting the theme tags?
> I am very interested in this area - will help with documentation to whatever
> degree I can be helpful, and will be doing what I can to develop theme
> options from what i have on the drawing board.

Help with documentation would be great, you might like to contact
Andrea about that (I think she's the one with the gold-plated pen).

> Of course it should be an option for admins if they want to have multiple
> themes available to end users or not. We should also have the ability to
> offer a paid feature for premium members to have more themes or different
> themes.

Well, it's not up to me to discuss premium anything, but we will
definitely be giving site admins these options. After all, it's part
of WPMU already.

> Would it make sense to have two checkboxes next tot he user(author) fields
> that users could select for exporting information? Like a checkbox to export
> to friends or export off site. This way you could create an rss feed(?) of
> your own user details that could be sucked in by another wordpress install
> or open id kind of thing? If so I could check off my username, nickname,
> birthday and bio information as exportable off site, but keep my AIM id on
> site only, or friends only. We could also have a check box to include
> booklists or bookmarks (or sub bookmarks (which could include urls of
> friends for friends lists) - if this created a custom rss url it could be
> shared that way...

With the aim of keeping things simple, it may be best to start with
privacy setting such as "Family, Friends, Group members, Site, Global"
which will map with your suggestion. What level of detail we go to
depends on what Andy wants to do with his XProfile feature (but as
different profile information is grouped it might be possible to set
privacy levels at a per-profile-data-group level)

> I think it would be cool to have the option for a permanent url with this
> custom selected info, or have the url expire after a selected amount of time
> (24 hours) - so it could be used for importing elsewhere temporarily.
>
> wpmuinstall.com/yourpage/feed=publicuserinfoexport.rss

Possibly, alhough with OpenID and OAuth the expiry might not be necessary.

> Of course I imagine that different networks will have different info, and
> many will want to have custom fields - so the universal formatting will be
> an issue. I see some sites have fields for birthday, and some have
> astrological signs and marriage status etc. Some people may want to include
> their work info, and some sites will have custom fields for god knows what
> else

yes, this is the major problem we've got with exporting/importing
profiles. Past the basic data (name etc) anything goes. Still, there
are smart people thinking about this so we're bound to come up with a
good solution soon.

Chris