[GSoC_Project] : Enhancing User Profiles

[Buddhima Wijeweera]

GSoC_Project : Enhancing User Profiles

The idea is to enhance the current user profile system with social media. This will use existing libraries in joomla and have to use a flexible and modular way to implement

Expected results:

1. cms libraries for Avatar services (including a local version)
   
2. Managing keys for avatar services 
   
3. Top-level configuration (for webmasters) on which services are allowed to use
   
4. Enable individual users to specify which Avatar service desire to use (select one from allowed ones)
   
5. Modernize frontend com_contact appearance
   

I would appreciate your feed back to make this a good and valuable project idea for Joomla! CMS

Thank You!

[Mohamed Infaz]

Hi Buddhima, 

I would like to contribute to this project, Since i feel i have done ground work in this by creating a gravatar plugin, The user profile of other CMS's are pretty attractive and nice but Joomla certainly does need a UI improvement. Gravatar almost fetches most of the data which is needed for this project but we can have a form and prompt the user to enter all the data which is required. Also the this could be integrated with core so we can create a news module etc.. And going in the last year projects list i found this idea of protecting user sensitive data which would need some working to do, this is very important in the context because if the server is compromised there is a danger in loosing credentials. Using different social media services we could give a nice attractive look to the user profile which i say must, And also we could think of syncing web site posts to social media which we could fetch external comments which is already seen in CMS's such wordpress. I am quite satisfied to work with this project and I really do feel Joomla needs this to the core right now. 

Thank you. 

[Viper]

May not be necessary to do 'Wordpress hel'l from Joomla CMS? All these capabilities IMHO must be as an external component(plugin, module).

[Buddhima Wijeweera]

Hi,

Thank you for paying your attention on this idea.

What this idea suggesting was to provide an infrastructure for any cms development to use avatar services (not just Gravatar).

Social media has become a very common thing today, so the users and developers expect basic level infrastructure from a CMS (any kind of CMS).

Through this project, it'll possible to use avatar infrastructure for user profiles plus any other Joomla extension in a modular and very extensible way. 

Main application of this project will be to enhance the user profiles, but can be use by any other external extension (eg: related to articles, comments etc.)

Also in future if there'll be some new social media, it'll be very easy for webmasters to manage and users to connect.

Thank You!

On Friday, February 28, 2014 1:22:18 AM UTC+5:30, Buddhima Wijeweera wrote:

[Mohamed Infaz]

Hi Buddhima,

Sure will look in to it, We can decide on what Plugins to be done. Need bit more clarification on Modernizing com_contact appearance. 

Regards,

M.I.M. Infaz

Undergaduate

Department of Computer Science and Engineering

University of Moratuwa

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[Buddhima Wijeweera]

Hi Infaz,

That's something I thought additional to the main project idea, but has some relevance.

You may try adding a contact page to Joomla! site (sample tutorial: http://www.siteground.com/tutorials/joomla/joomla-contact-us.htm) with contact details.

Then check the frontend appearance of that contact page. You'll definitely feel, it needs modernization.

Cheers!

On Friday, February 28, 2014 1:22:18 AM UTC+5:30, Buddhima Wijeweera wrote:

[Mohamed Infaz]

Sure will check that and have a clarification. 

Regards,

M.I.M. Infaz

Undergaduate

Department of Computer Science and Engineering

University of Moratuwa

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[Josh Weiss]

I would slightly take a different approach to user profiles.

1. Use or add CMS libraries to connect and import data from other services. It would also be awesome to include OAuth2 authentication or some type of key to log into a Joomla account by pulling credentials from other services.
2. Some sort of API to access common keys in a profile system. Problem I am seeing is everyone builds their own profile system. Each individual extension may or may not have integration to other profile systems.  As more software is added to the JED the various profile systems become difficult to manage.  Better yet we should have a custom field options that are accessible through API calls which extension developers could hook into in their own software.  In general at Kunena we like to officially dump our profile system if a robust more generalized and centralized system was built.  Plus we would have access to any data that was provided from other extensions.
   

[Mohamed Infaz]

Hi Josh,

Basically what if we build a system which is basically API which give common ground to all profile systems, May be something Like JProfile and JFacebook, JLinkedin could be child classes of Jprofile will can generalize this to fullest attention and choose the web master to decide what system will be used, Main importance of the profile system is that can be used for com_contacts, com_articles, com_users which are bit of weak aspects in Joomla at the moment, any more facts will be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

Regards,

M.I.M. Infaz

Undergaduate

Department of Computer Science and Engineering

University of Moratuwa

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[Josh Weiss]

"JProfile and JFacebook, JLinkedin could be child classes of Jprofile"

Awesome idea, but it should be limited to infinitely many systems wanted to be used.  Whether it be just Facebook or Linkedin, or both.  Webmasters should be giving those options.

The second addition I was proposing above was for Developers more then Webmasters.  However it gives better overall options to Webmasters if Developers adopt a more generalized and centralized API system for profiles.  It also would allow Extension Developers to be able to easily share some user specific data from their software. The point I am trying to make is it would be useful if there was some software that mediated data of user specific information from two different sources by providing a common input and output constraints.  The best way to put this in an interface is to have a similar approach we have for the menu system.  Allow Webmasters to enable and select what data Extension Developers have made available in their exteions that could be reflected in a common accessibilty API for a profile system.

[Mohamed Infaz]

Hi Josh,

Thank you for those ideas, well common inputs and outputs are really must i would say so the API's are more generalized, success of the project stands with the more generalizing that i can bring to the whole profile system so it should be flexible for any service specific plugin, and having a common ground to the API's makes developer life very easy.

https://github.com/infazse/joomla-cms/blob/master/plugins/content/avatar/avatar.php

This is a plugin i created which retrieves information of an author if he has a gravatar account having the same email address in Joomla and gravatar is enough to retrieve following information. As you said this is a specific way of getting the information. I too believe the flexibility of the profile system lies on with more generalization that we could form in to the system will look in to this in a serious manner, Thank you for your valuable thoughts.

Cheers!! 

Regards,

M.I.M. Infaz

Undergaduate

Department of Computer Science and Engineering

University of Moratuwa

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[Chad Windnagle]

I personally feel that this project works just as well as an extension that extends the core. Plugins are able to really do this fairly easily I think and that prevents us from having to track it in the core. 

[Mohamed Infaz]

Hi Chad,

What could be the draw backs of integrating the profile system to the core? Basically the system helps lots of developers in a way to use the API plus doesn't it make the com_contact and com_users more consistent, your thoughts will be really appreciated

Thank you. 

Regards,

M.I.M. Infaz

Undergaduate

Department of Computer Science and Engineering

University of Moratuwa

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[Matt Thomas]

Hello all,

One aspect to keep in mind is that we are pursuing the idea of Joomla distributions, and while this is a great enhancement, it probably would be best to not couple it tightly with the core. Even if requires the addition of a library, that could still be accomplished with a plugin. One other aspect to keep in mind is that these could also be accepted as an official project extension (https://github.com/orgs/joomla-extensions/).

Just a few ideas that I thought might be worth sharing.

Best,

Matt Thomas

203.632.9322
http://betweenbrain.com/

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[Mohamed Infaz]

Hi Thomas,

Thanks for bring that up will look forward to other ideas in this year so i can make a healthy contribution. 

Regards,

M.I.M. Infaz

Undergaduate

Department of Computer Science and Engineering

University of Moratuwa

[Matt Thomas]

You're very welcome. Please don't take my comment as that this project should not proceed. I think it is a very good one and the discussion is more about how to implement it.

Best,

Matt Thomas

203.632.9322
http://betweenbrain.com/

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[Chad Windnagle]

Another thing to keep in mind is we are trying to decrease dependancies between components like com_content and com_contact, so I see this is going back towards what we're trying to not do.

Regards,
Chad Windnagle

[Mohamed Infaz]

Hi chad,

ok So that is why this year there is a project called dependency manager too, need a suggestion from you can you like suggest an idea that in the current list that i can look in to, i would highly appreciate that, i still feel i have enough time and since i am bit familiar with Joomla. 

Thank you. 

Regards,

M.I.M. Infaz

Undergaduate

Department of Computer Science and Engineering

University of Moratuwa

[sovainfo]

Hope that the project is referring to the hardcoded dependancies between extensions. The objective should be to remove them. Dependancies should be configurable and flexible in their implementation.   The administrator should be able to configure them.

[Mohamed Infaz]

Hi, 

The thread was about adding a user profile system to the core and creating an infrastructure to use other external services as well, I would like to know about the project dependency manager too, The project description lacks details about the project can i have a bit of an overview. 

Thanks

Regards,

M.I.M. Infaz

Undergaduate

Department of Computer Science and Engineering

University of Moratuwa

On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 12:03 AM, sovainfo <webm...@sovainfo.nl> wrote:

Hope that the project is referring to the hardcoded dependancies between extensions. The objective should be to remove them. Dependancies should be configurable and flexible in their implementation.   The administrator should be able to configure them.

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[Buddhima Wijeweera]

Hi,

Personally, I think there should be a way to display personal information of a user (eg. 'About Me' module). I know there's a quite a lot of extensions out there for that. But as a CMS, it should be there. Because that's one thing that website owners (specially bloggers) search for just after setting up the website. So hope lib. like JProfile will provide infrastructure for that.

Thanks!

On Friday, February 28, 2014 1:22:18 AM UTC+5:30, Buddhima Wijeweera wrote:

[ssnobben]

Agree about display personal information of a user. Joomla is so much focused on content but misses a lot of features for users that is needed. Thinking of customized fields, time triggers, user groups reg process and marketing in general to users in a Joomla system.

So I would love to see more core user focus improvement like the reg process with dynamic fields population. It could be used with the following scenario when register to a Joomla site:

User choose user group A and then the customized fields a,b,c,e, f, g only shows up. This could be used later as tags as well.

User choose user group B and then the customized fields a,b,c, f, g, h  only shows up. So depending on your choice of user group you get some reg fields populated for just that user group.

I also would like it easy to add extra customized fields to the user profile like Community Builder, JomSocial have with customized fields and that also could be used as tags for marketing automation.
So you for example could use with 3pds system like AcyMailing for campaign and newsletter marketing automation.

Sending email to group(s) xxxx with tags(customized fields) yyy and at time ttt.

What you think?

rgds

aka ssnobben