Advanced Profile Wiki

This wiki page is to create a roadmap for the Advanced Profile module. I already had a pretty good idea of what I wanted based on response to my tutorials but it helps to have it down on "paper". This is just a start and mostly a "mind dump" at this point. I will flesh it out more based on feedback.

Modules

Advanced Profile is a glue module which uses existing contributed modules for the bulk of the functionality. These are the major modules used:

Panels 2: This is the anchor module. The bulk of advprofile is actually a modularized set of panels. At this point, panels handles the display of the profile but the plan is to have it handle the editing as well.

CCK: Creating a node type with CCK is reccomended to hold the profile data though I intend to make it work with core profile as well.

Views: The user's recent posts and the buddylist are the current views but there's a lot of potential for views to be used for other things like an image gallery.

Bio/Nodeprofile: Since profiles aren't nodes in core, we need a connection between the user and their profile node(s). At this point it only works with bio but the plan is to make it work with nodeprofile as well.

Comment: Rather than using a guestbook, we make use of comments on the user profile node. Using User Comment will give the users control over the entries. This will be an issue when trying to use the core profile module for the data so I'll have to figure out how to get around that. It also means that it's impossible to comment on the "guestbook" before a user has filled out their profile as there's no node to comment on.

There are a ton of smaller SN modules that can be used on the profiles:

Buddylist: Allows users to designate friends. With the addition of Usernode, we can make use of views. Advprofile comes with a themed view for displaying the buddies with avatar. Also with buddylist, you can use Activiity which is a nifty module for seeing what your buddies are up to.

An alternative to Buddylist is the newer User Relationships module. Last I checked, there wasn't any way make a view like I have with buddylist/usernode, though. Some big names in the community are pushing for user relationships, though, so I will be taking a hard look at it soon and seeing if I can write some code that will let you use bio to make a user relationship view the way that buddylist/usernode works. I don't know if there are plans to make this work with activity.

If you have these modules enabled, they'll show up on the profile:
User points
User badges
privatemsg
Contact (core)
There's more little modules like this that could be added. I need to look through the modules list and find them all.

Auto nodetitles: The title of the profile isn't used for anything so this module will just fill it in and hide it.

Fivestar: This could be used for rating users but isn't implemented in advprofile yet.

Mysite: I've been looking into making it possible to add mysite droplets to panels. No real progress here, yet. There's a lot of good stuff in this module and I'd like to make use of it with profiles.

[MySite developer note] -- use mysite_display('droplet', $droplet_id) inside a panel or block. Or use mysite_render() to return raw data for theming. See also the mysite_type_hook_options() and mysite_type_hook_data() functions and http://drupal.org/node/194341.

Editing

At the moment, the edit page is just the dump of fields you get with CCK by default. My plan is a lot grander. I want to use panels to override the edit page and theme it nicely. First this requires an addition to panels (or maybe CCK) to allow the fields to be broken up across panes. So editing is waiting for either me or someone else to write that bit.

The next step after that is to allow users to move the blocks around and change the CSS in a limited fashion. This will require the ability to assign a panel configuration to a user rather than having one panel page where you pass in the uid. Sam Treseler (from memory, sorry if I mangled that) is working on panels profiles which should help wtih this. I think this will be a really killer feature for user profiles and let you offer users myspace like functionality.

Resources

Project page: http://drupal.org/project/advanced_profile
Demo page: http://advprofile.shellmultimedia.com
History: http://shellmultimedia.com/misc/user-profiles

Further thoughts

If you have any suggestions, please leave a comment. This is a wiki and anyone can edit it but I'd prefer no massive changes be done to it. If anyone wants to do things like fill in missing paths to projects or add to my list of small helper modules, that would be great. Support requests on the issue queue, please. This wiki is for planning, not support.

Michelle