Why can't people just use a bookmark? (I know I don't) :)
Allen Gilliland wrote:
Dave wrote:
On 1/25/07, Allen Gilliland <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
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?
Yes. Don't those belong on the user or a new user-profile object? A
weblog has multiple users and could therefore have multiple bios and
avatars.
Doh, I meant to specifically address that in my original email but
forgot :/
I had the same initial thought, but I came up with a few reasons why
these items wouldn't be associated with a user profile actually ...
1. with the many-to-many relationship between users and weblogs there
is really no reliable way to get to a user from a weblog and more
importantly there is no guaranteed way of getting a single user for a
weblog. so it would be troublesome to figure out which profile to use
in group blog situations.
2. users may own multiple weblogs and may not want to use the same
avatar and bio on both/all of them.
3. users may also come and go from a weblog, i.e. join and be owner
for a while then leave it to someone else. while this isn't likely to
happen very often, it would be a definite problem if a user who was
controlling the avatar and bio on a weblog and that stuff wasn't
available anymore.
I also think that at the end of the day the image and bio are really a
property of the weblog and in most cases are just being used to
highlight the author. However, in many cases they can be used in a
more generic way such as being an icon and a tagline. So I think it's
easiest and most appropriate to have them as properties of a weblog.
-- Allen
- Dave
--
Dave
*David Levy *
*Principal Engineer*
*Sun Microsystems Ltd.*
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