On Wednesday 05 July 2006 10:20 pm, Elliot Lee wrote:
Hey Tom! Thanks for keeping us on task here :)
Here are some of the things I have been thinking of for the new
account system:
For users:
- Allow listing more than one e-mail address per account
(
linkedin.com is the site I remember doing this right)
- Clean up the interface
- Have a top-level menu that is shown on all pages, with quick
links to different pieces of the account system
- Allow doing the sign-up process as a wizard-style step-by-step
interface, instead of a bunch of random links to
- Make documentation a part of the interface
- In particular, there is a lot of concern that getting a GPG key
is too complicated for a lot of people such as translators, who are
not technical types. We need to make that process as clear and simple
and documented as possible
can we provide a script for nontechnical types?
- The user info screen might want to evolve from just an "edit
my
information" screen
All sounds good I read it to mean simpler and more
integrated
For administrators:
- Clean up the interface
- With hundreds of users and 10s of groups, we definitely need a
nicer way to find specific users or groups than paging through them 1
by 1...
- The part of the interface where you add users to or remove users
from a group is clunky. In particular, it's currently possible to add
a user to a group more than once, and if a user is rejected from a
group, there is no way to let them come back at a later date and
reapply...
- Make the e-mail reminders a bit smarter and nicer to read
- Allowing administrators to mark membership applications as
"acknowledged" would be nice for administrators, especially for Extras
- Allow setting a per-group e-mail message to be sent to people
when their membership in a group reaches different stages...
- Allow groups to be members of other groups (i.e. you are a member
in group B because you are a member in group A, and A is a member of
B). Can't do this nicely with the current SQL schema. I did it nicely
with the old Red Hat build system, but it requires using text fields
instead of numeric IDs to specify the names of the group members...
with the right
interface it shouldn't matter if GID's/UID's are numerical or
text
For everyone:
- Need more free-form text fields everywhere (e.g. comments that are
visible only to admins, or whatever). Maybe it should just be
something that holds XML that is processed by the apps...
- Privacy issues need to be thought out more clearly and addressed.
In particular, this relates to what information we store
- Need to make iron-clad sure that the rewrite does NOT muck with
the legal issues surrounding the CLA (i.e. we have to continue to
guarantee that people have submitted the CLA form by a GPG signature
with a key that is tied to a verified e-mail address)
- Account System 2.0 should get run by Red Hat's legal department
to just make them feel comfortable with the change
I would imagine this is a must.
We cant freak them out :D
- On a related note, we need to add proper support for the
corporate
CLA. If we had 'groups being members of other groups' implemented, it
would be fairly easy to create a group for each corporation that
signed the CCLA, have each of those groups be a member of the
cla_done group, and having access to the corporate CLA groups
administered by a designated contact...
Sounds good. is there many corporate
CLA's?
Behind the scenes:
- Rewrite the code to be cleaner (maybe use turbogears, or maybe
that is too heavyweight)
- Make it easier to embed into other apps, especially the signup
process (so that Extras can have a custom "sign up as an extras
contributor" wizard that can easily do the basic account system steps
as part of its workflow
- Figure out the whole LDAP vs SQL thing
Why not use both? some thing will be
just easier in ldap, some in SQL, use
SQL as a backend to ldap Its a little more work but would provide greatest
flexibility.
- At the end, port the application interface parts (get_auth,
have_auth, have_group, etc.) to perl and php so that we can use them
from all our applications
Hope this helps,
-- Elliot
--
Dennis Gilmore, RHCE
Proud Australian