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Jeff Chandler

First Steps Taken To Add WordCamp Data To WordPress.org User Profiles

WordPress.org user profiles already display a user’s activity, plugins and themes they’re associated with, and their favorite plugins. What if data from WordCamp.org could be displayed as well? If this sounds interesting, keep an eye on the Make WordPress Community blog. Ian Dunn has begun the process by asking what kind of data to display from WordCamp.org and whether those items should be shown within the activity stream or as an association.

User Profiles As They Are Today
User Profiles As They Are Today

The project is in the preliminary stages with the hopes of being accomplished in time to be merged with the overall revamp of WordPress.org profiles. As part of the Google Summer of Code in 2013, Mert Yazicioglu took on the task of enhancing WordPress.org profiles. Mert published a screencast that shows what they would have looked like. Early feedback showed Mert was on to something but ultimately, his version was not implemented.

Proposed Profile Design From GSoC 2013
Proposed Profile Design From GSoC 2013

According to Jen Mylo, “the UI changes proposed in the GSoC project were very minor and did not increase usability or usefulness.” Mylo and Mel Choyce will work together to improve the UI once improvements are made to the backend of the project.

WordPress.org Profiles As Social Badges

I’m looking forward to the day when profiles showcase accomplishments by individuals in the community. It would be cool if profiles become something like a badge that people could proudly show on their site letting everyone know how active they are in the community. There has been suggestions that profiles could be tied into the OpenBadges project by Mozilla. Integration could open up new possibilities to encourage learning.

What types of data would you like to see on your WordPress.org profile page?

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7 responses to “First Steps Taken To Add WordCamp Data To WordPress.org User Profiles”

  2. I would love if WordPress community would extend user profiles by inspiring some things from other popular communities like Stack Exchange.

    I’d like us to have rules on how we can win reputation points by quality interaction in the community, from publishing plugins, themes, providing help on forums, involving in documentation and many other areas.

    For many of us would represent something valuable, for example when looking for jobs (look at Stack’s Career 2.0).

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  4. Making the profile pages better is really needed. It’s sad that the GSoC 2013 project is not yet implemented – as a first step.

    However, I am against displaying data of WordCamps/ WordCamp Central on those profile pages and I give my reasons for that:

    There are a lot more events within the WordPress community that are not organized by the WordCamp Central/ The Foundation/ Automattic – such as other conferences, meetups or other barcamp-like camps, like the WP Camp in Germany for example.

    What should be even displayed from WordCamps? if you have visited one? If you have spoken at one? Who has all that data? — And if that data still exists from all these years, should it be public at all?

    And also: you in the U.S. have lots of WordCamps, every week almost is one — so it would lead to that, that for some “rock stars” in the North American WordCamp scene the profile page will burst with WordCamp stuff: visiting, speaking etc. ;-)

    For other parts of the world: there is a growing number of WordCamps/ WP Camps, Foundation-organized or non-Foundation-organized, still, taken for one country or region you rarely have those numbers than in U.S. …

    Lots of European countries have “only” one WordCamp per year, if at all. Some countries have camps/meetups/conferences but not with the Foundation in that (for whatever reason).

    How would you manage all that to not make much differences between the whole global community?

    Example: You were to 10 non-Foundation organized events but none of them would then show on the profile page? Would be no good I guess…

    All in all we should not include such event data, at least not in an “automated” kind of thing!

    The better way would be to make another textarea maybe where users can fill out event data manually – but fully optional?

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    • A lot of the issue here relates to the backend and getting everything accessible directly, by the core .org code. A lot of this is now working and reasonably stable and proven, so it’s a good time to start implementing extra data display.

      In a system with 7 million+ user accounts, it takes time to build things that scale well. ;-)

      But it’s not just about speakers, we’d like to display and showcase organizers, volunteers, and everything else. At least, as much as possible. Obviously, data we don’t have can’t be displayed, so getting that all there is the first step. And we can add as we go too.

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