[drupal-devel] CiviCRM, Civicgroups, OG, Profile- Playing together

[Boris Mann]

On 13-May-05, at 11:08 AM, neil at civicspacelabs.org wrote:

> On Fri, May 13, 2005 at 09:11:27AM +0200, Dries Buytaert wrote:
>
>> On 12 May 2005, at 16:43, David Geilhufe wrote:
>>
>>> Or does it make sense for CiviCRM to "take over"
>>> the Profile functionality if it's installed? (We
>>> tend toword the latter approach to keep the model
>>> cleaner and provide the opportunity for deeper
>>> integration to a shared data model).

Provide a proposal (patches!) for an improvement to profile module.  
This gets your hooks into core. You need to work in the context of  
Drupal.org itself. If you can provide a more powerful replacement for  
profile module....great! That would seem to be task number one in  
representing user data, and you can then apply whatever changes you  
need to support your goals (e.g. APIs, user data that exists separate  
from accounts, etc.).

Are there modules you can put on Drupal.org itself? A modular  
approach is going to be needed, and you'll need to figure out how  
they work together.

>> required to syndicate information between sites.  Either way,  
>> we're not
>> opposed to patches that make the profile module more
>> extensible/powerful.
>>
> How did the FOAF module solve this?  I'd think a data model is
>
> FOAF really didn't have an ideal solution to this. Chris Messina had
> some strong criticism for it:
>
> # The FOAF module has the worst possible UI I've ever seen. It doesn't
> # help you get started, it begins with a dirth of stupid fields that
> # don't allow you to fix the problem of associating the fields with
> # contact fields. Why doesn't the software do the association for  
> you?!
> #
> # This module is ONE BIG DEAD END!
> http://civicspacelabs.org/home/node/6939

Excellent criticism...with no suggestions on how to fix this.

We (Bryght) ship profile + FOAF pre-configured, so it "just works".  
It is "solved" by a mapping interface between defined profile fields  
and the standard set of FOAFnet fields. Of course, core Drupal ships  
with profile empty, which means it takes a while to configure. I  
think  we had discussed this a while back...shipping profile with a  
set of pre-defined, standard fields.

--
Boris Mann
http://www.bmannconsulting.com