2 of the things that pretty much all weblog owners tend to put in their
templates are 1) a picture, typically of themselves and 2) a short bio
paragraph. Right now, Roller doesn't provide any easy way for these
items to be controlled via the editing UI and so for people to add them
to their blogs they must hack at templates.
I am currently working with some folks at Sun who are designing some new
blog themes and these 2 items have come up in every one of the designs
so I'd like to propose that they be added as built-in attributes of a
weblog. This way theme writers and template hackers can have a simple
and consistent way of getting these pieces of information for a weblog
and allowing users to control them without having to edit templates.
The technical side of this would be very simple, just adding 2 new
columns to the website table ...
image varchar(255) null
bio text null (or can varchar work?)
then of course adding them to the pojos and a couple of simple UI
controls on the Weblog Settings page to edit them. The UI controls
would be simple right now, just a textfield for the image and a textarea
for the bio. In the future we can improve the image field to use some
kind of image selector from the users uploads, etc.
anyone object to adding these 2 attributes for weblogs?
-- Allen
