User Profiles and Element Sets

Hi all,

I'm working on a User Profiles plugin, and would like to ask what Elements and/or Element Sets you all think would be most important to include. Any thoughts and idea much appreciated!

Thanks,
Patrick

Cool! I would think these would be a good place to start:

Name
School/Inst./Org.
Position
Website
Bio
Exhibits/Contributions/Posters

What about Gravatar support? Too much?

I wonder if the user's profile could be called into other areas of the site, perhaps on a simple page (with multiple users) or even better on an exhibit page under the Credit line.

Hope these ideas help. Looking forward to this plug-in!

Thanks for the ideas! One goal for this (keeping fingers crossed that I can figure it out), is definitely to enrich credits/acknowledgements options. That's part of why I was interested in your work with Contributions and Posters a while ago.

Gravatar support (and OpenID, a suggestion I got from Ed Summers) would be super-cool, but beyond me, at least for now!

I've been planning a similar plugin for a research project, and wonder how similar/different we're thinking about its possible implementation. I think a user profiles plugin should be separate from an authentication method, for which many possible plugins could be created (OpenID, LDAP, etc).

There are two distinct ways of approaching this: extending the pre-existing MyOmeka plugin, or creating something that's more flexible and is stand-alone. MyOmeka already has authentication built in (which mostly uses what's built into Omeka's core).

Regarding the user's profile, there are some *core* user profile fields (biography, display name, location) that should be packaged w/ the plugin.. others, such as "position" or "Exhibits/Contributions/Posters" may not be applicable to most users. In terms of development, it may make sense to start w/ those core profile fields, and eventually create an interface for an administrator to add additional user profile fields.

Btw, implementing gravatar onto a site is only a few lines of PHP, so that's no sweat.

Dave

Dave,

Maybe we should compare what we've got so far, then. I'd hate to duplicate something already in the works.

Here's the basic approach I'm going with so far. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this won't lead me down a dead end.

I'm going the stand-alone route, and modeling it as much as I can off Items, so that I can take advantage of as many of the Element and ElementSet tools as I can. I'm hoping that'll make it easy to do what you're describing and prepackage particular ElementSets for profiles that are suited to particular needs (one site might need an 'Academic Background' Profile ElementSet, while another might need a 'Community Affiliations' Profile ElementSet, in addition to the core fields, plus FOAF and maybe others for linked data if ya want). The ElementSets (and hopefully eventually down to individual Elements) in profiles is configurable by an admin.

(One note---I'm not sure if this is doing it wrong or not, but to make some of that work I created a model called UserProfile_ActsAsElementText that extends ActsAsElementText. (needed to override getElements(), and maybe some other methods down the road. ) Is doing that a no-no?)

Each profile is associated with a User, so I'm hoping that one way or another the connection between Exhibit/Contribution/Poster/whatever would happen by way of the User. Not sure yet what that's gonna imply for theming.

Cool about gravatars! I'll dig into that!

Anyway, that's where I am and what I have in mind. Let me know if this sounds like a good path.

Thanks!