Re: Drupal Puzzle Pieces

[Anthony B. <abo...@ga...>]

Personally, I can't wait for "Milestone 5 - Collect Underpants". Might I
suggest a "Revenge of the Nerds" style raid. o_O

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jonas M Luster" <jl...@jl...>
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Sent: Sunday, May 09, 2004 5:15 PM
Subject: Re: Drupal Puzzle Pieces


> Hopefully we’re all in sync and know what we’re gonna do – right?

I guess what we're missing is a set of tangible milestones and short
term design goals. Let me try to outline some of the things I see...

We have a core:

[ core ]

this core holds basic user information, as well as a set of pointers to
instances:

[ core ]
|   \   \   \   \
[ instances ]

each instance represents a "persona" of the account in question. The
account can hold an infinite amount of personae, each of which is
linked to either an internal or an external service, which in turn
holds data, such as weblog postings, news, images, your bank statement,
or the list of girlfriends to call next week.

What is needed here:

a) A core
b) Instantiations
and
c) communication protocols between external and internal sources

there are a number of ways, how this could be glued together - FOAF,
some proprietary system, or something else. I assume you want FOAF.

so here:

                   [ core ]
                  / <----- FOAF glue
[ instance ]
                 \   <----- infoexchange protocol
      [ external or internal source ]

Taking this to tangible milestones:

a) we need a core. The core must be able to transparently address any
number of instances, all of which should be agnostic towards the data
they receive and send. In Drupal talk, we need to expand user.module
and profile.module to include those changes.

b) we need means to communicate and extract info from FOAF data. Again,
this might be handled by Drupal, and requires something like the
drupal.module.

c) We need APIs between the external and internal services. This can be
done by creating a new node-type and attaching the service to it.
node-types then are tied to personae and all personae are tied to one
account.

Milestone 1: Make Drupal multi-personae capable
Milestone 2: Ensure Drupal's ability to authenticate against and
retrieve data from FOAF
Milestone 3: Create node-types and tie them to personae
Milestone 4: Create "commons" module for registered users
Milestone 5: Collect underpants
Milestone 6: ...
Milestone 7: Profit

jonas