[ckan-dev] User profile vs dashboard and edit profile vs edit settings

Fri Dec 14 18:53:11 UTC 2012

Hey, I think some user interface reorganisation is probably needed
around the user profile and dashboard.

The way I think about it, your profile is your public page for others to
see, whereas your dashboard is a private page to help you manage what
you're doing with ckan.

Currently some private information shows up on your profile page when you
login: your email address and API key. It seems like these should be
moved to the dashboard page.

Second, currently when you go to edit profile you can change your public
information such as username and full name, about text, and also private
information like your password and (on a feature branch) whether you
have email notifications on or off. It seems to me that we might want to
split this into two seperate things:

1. Updating your public profile, which creates a "seanh updated their
profile" activity in your public activity stream and on the dashboards
of anyone following you

2. Updating private settings like your password, email address, email
notifications on/off. Currently because these are done on the edit
profile page, it creates a "seanh updated their profile" activity for
everyone to see, even if I just changed my email notifications setting
or password, and didn't change any public information.

User-interface-wise, I'm not sure how we want to implement it. Do we
actually want two seperate pages 'Edit Your Profile' and 'Edit Your
Settings'? If so, where do we want to put the navigation links to each?
Or do we want a single 'Account Settings' page that has e.g. a sidebar
with links to different pages 'Profile' and 'Account Settings'? That's
what github does, and it seems like quite a good idea because it's
extensible, if we have many more settings in the feature we can add new
sidebar items, instead of cramming everything into one form.