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

Fri Dec 14 19:05:08 UTC 2012

Hey Sean,

On Fri, 14 Dec 2012 19:53:11 +0100, Sean Hammond <sean.hammond at okfn.org>  
wrote:

> 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.

Agreed.

> 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

Sounds good.

> 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.

True.

> 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.

I think two different pages are the best way of doing so.
It clearly separates privacy settings and public profile data.
+1

Cheers,
Sven