Expanding Authors Informations

Jeremie · 2006-03-18 20:11:56

This is a first formal talk about this idea, to be improved and reviewed by the community, before a formal Textbook draft is written.

Goal: expand the authors (as in “the people who write articles”) informations and datas, who they input it, and how it may be displayed.

Backend input

Each TXP’s user (or author) would have a backend page to input the datas. An author could only access its own page, except for the people with the right priv (the admin by default) who can access and edit everyone. The datas itself would be (by default they are editable by the author):

Login: as existing, non-editable
Password: : as existing, editable, with a function to email a new random password to itself
Real name: as existing
Email: as existing
Privs: as existing (or as the workflow workgroup work), editable if you have the appropriate priv
Public page: the full URL (with a link) to the author’s public page, non-editable (to keep the dev work low)
Custom n: several custom fields, similar to the article’s one in every way (except the size of them this time, pleaaaase). Example of use: lagitude & longitude for geolocalisation, URL of a forum profile, corporate office or division, phone number, IRL adress.
Article: the ID (with some clever input/selection) of an existing TXP article. Can be used for biography, unkind words, whatever. It use the existing system (Textile, etc.) for ease of use and development, and it allow to open comments for visitors to leave a message or comment on the author himself.

I was first going to add a lot of fields like gender, webpage, photo/avatar, biography, location, etc. But I think both the custom fields (if in appropriate quantity) and the free-form article allow more customization, ease of use, and power.

Public page

Same as now, accessible with /author/author-name. But with tags to output every informations stored in the database about the author (if wanted by the admin). These could be:

txp:author_realname
txp:author_email : with a raw attribute it display the raw email to be used whatever way the admin want. with a form attribute, it display a form to send an email to the author without displaying its email in any way (anti-spam).
txp:author_rank
txp:author_url
txp:author_customN (n would be 1, 2, 3, etc.)
txp:author_selfarticle with a form attribute, it’s the linked article of course. I don’t see any needs for others attributes.
txp:article work as always, but TXP detect the context of the page and only display (by default) the author’s articles.

Misc

I think that’s pretty it. It’s unsure about a txp:author_images to display the images by that author on its public page.

And to make use of all these tags, I would think we would need either a txp:if_author_display and/or a specific page because the /author/ page would be quite different as a /category/ (and even more of the frontpage) in structure and code.

Any comments, ideas ?

gerhard · 2006-03-19 09:20:23

Yes, this sort of functionality would be highly useful Jeremie! Rob’s rss_author_info does a similar thing, but having it core would be amazing. I love the idea of custom fields. It goes well with TXP’s bright nature. ; )

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#1 2006-03-18 20:11:56