[buddypress-dev] Privacy component

[Chris Taylor - stillbreathing.co.uk]

Hi,

A few days ago I said I was working on adding tagging to my friends
plugin for myJournal. It's done and working nicely, and after a good
conversation with a few people in IRC (room #buddypress on freenode;
come on in, the water's fine) it looks like this could form part of a
powerful global privacy framework. I did a screenshot of what I've
been working on which I hope will help to clarify what I meant. See it
here: http://www.stillbreathing.co.uk/images/misc/friend-tags.jpg

This shows a number of things. Firstly wherever it says "Contacts"
read "Friends", for myJournal those kind of words are configurable by
the site admin. You can see a list of "Groups", which is our name for
friend tags. Selecting one of these gives you just the people with
that tag (it's only single tag selection at the moment). You can also
see some pagination, the there's the details for the first friend.

Below the name and description for the friend you can see a list of
checkboxes with tag names. The first few (Family -> Supplier) are
pre-configured by the site admin. Really the "Friend" tag is redundant
because everyone in this list is a friend regardless of what other
tags they may have.

To assign tags to the friend select the checkboxes you want. You can
also enter a comma-separated list of new tags into the textbox. When
you add new tags it assigns those new tags to the current friend
automatically, and also adds those new tags as checkbox options for
all other friends. Tags you add are just for you, no-one else can see
them. If you remove one of your own tags from all your friends that
tag wil disappear from the checkbox list.

A couple of things could make this better. Firstly for long lists of
tags there will lots of checkboxes - imagine 30 checkboxes repeated
for every friend down the page. Nasty. Secondly it would be nice to
assign tags to multiple people and save them all in one go; at the
moment you have to save each friends tags individually. But that's not
a massive job to change.

Any comments?

Chris