Will’s Similiblog

Without a few tweaks, posts will be identified as authored by “xena123″ or similar usernames. To make this a truly social experience, I’ll need to have real names resolve as authors; and to add a carbon-based element to the user experience, I’ll need user pictures to accompany posts.

Online conversations can be of very high quality, and can be quite human in character - my little Rosie (the Bernese retriever / golden mountain dog puppy in so many of my postings) came to me through an online friend, as a case example. But I am convinced that there is unique character to face-to-face conversations in the hall or library or the coffee shop across the street, and I’d like to see this platform act as a nidus around which such conversations can form. For this, we need to be able to hang our conversations around names and faces.

For this, we’ll need to configure drupal’s built-in user-picture support; enable and configure the core Profile module to provide a real name field; and install, make a minor hack on, and configure the 3rd-party Authorship module to substitute users’ full names for usernames in posts.

For pictures -

In Admin > user settings, check the Picture support - Enabled radio button.
The picture image path field needs to be designated (e.g., pictures)

In Admin > Themes, click on the “configure” tab; check the Display post information checkboxes for Blog entry and Feed item

Users can upload pictures at “My account”/edit
At Admin > user settings, you can post user picture guidelines - explaining that for the purposes of this site, these need to be real, recognizable photos; and not photos of the user’s dog, “avatars” of Xena Warrior Princess, &c.
I’ve found it handy to bring a digital camera to the first week of classes, and delegate to a student the task of getting pics of their classmates; these can be distributed for users to upload, or as admin, you can spend an evening getting pics up for a more cyber-confidence-impaired user population.

At Admin > Profiles, create a single-line textfield profile_fullname in category personal information. Check the public field - shown on profile page & on member list pages radio button, and the checkboxes for visible in user registration form and user must enter a value.

The Authorship module needs a small hack; as is, it will substitute the user’s fullname for the username in teaser view and in single-node page views, but not in views with multiple full-nodes on a page. To fix this:

open authorship.module, and edit line 157, to read
if( $page || $teaser || $node) {

At Admin > Content type > Blog entry, find Enable authorship module functionality and check the enabled radio button.  In the The profile variable name used to store the real name: field, enter profile_fullname.  Do the same at Admin > Content type > Feed item.

Done.  Now posts - both Blog entries and aggregated distributed user content - will now be identified by the user’s full name, and will be accompanied by the user’s photo.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 24th, 2008 at 7:22 pm and is filed under site_development.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.