[Theforum] New feature suggestions

Daniel J. Cody djc at members.evolt.org
Thu Nov 15 16:22:32 CST 2001


another idea would be this:

We get the member pages done so that people can add shit about their cats,
ICQ, AIM, email, phone, URL's, interests *AND* a textbox that says:

"If you'd like to have a snippet about yourself included at the end of any
articles you write, please enter it below:" (or something like that)

they fill it in with "Dan is a homemaker from Blah blah Wisconsin that
enjoys baking and knitting socks for orphaned kittens and currently works
at Joe's Diner"

*THEN* we put a simple query at the bottom of each article like so:

get member.authorSnippet from TABLE where authorid = 'X'


and it includes at the bottom of every article by that author a snippet
that they can edit from *one* place and is *always* relevant and *never* out of
date.

the idea you guys started with is good, but the implementation isn't
the best if you have to edit information about yourself for every article. if i wrote an article 2
years ago and included a snippet at the bottom of the page, it would say
I'm living in oshkosh(outdated), working at oracular.com(outdated), and
single(outdated). what i'm propsing would allow me to update the snippet
that gets shown at the bottom of my articles each time i change jobs,
move, or whatever - from one location and easily.

sure, i could edit the article and change the info manually, but for all
150 articles i have? no way.

and the beauty of doing it *this* way is you can allow it to be viewable
according the the privledges that rudy went over already.

its an idea. i like what you guys are talking about, but lets do it - if
we're going to do it - in the most practical way from the start.

i'm feeling enlightened about evolt today for some reason :)

.djc.

On Fri, 16 Nov 2001, Madhu Menon wrote:

> At 03:36 AM 11/16/2001, you wrote:
> >The easy solution is to add a text input field on the article submission 
> >page (and the appropriate database tweak), restricting the number of 
> >characters. People can include a link to a more extensive bio/portfolio if 
> >they want.
> 
> What Isaac and I were thinking is that it could simply be a part of the 
> article HTML itself. Don't need to modify the db for this.





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