[buddypress-trac] [BuddyPress] #2738: FOAF support / RDFa

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#2738: FOAF support / RDFa
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 Reporter:  boonebgorges  |       Owner:     
     Type:  enhancement   |      Status:  new
 Priority:  major         |   Milestone:  1.4
Component:  Core          |     Version:     
 Keywords:                |  
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 Support Friend of a Friend to make BuddyPress compliant with linked data
 standards. Good web citizenship :)

 This could be done with a plugin. DJPaul worked up a proof of concept in
 the 1.1.x days: http://svn.dangerous-minds.com/djpaul/out-of-the-box/ To
 my mind, though, there are some limitations to that approach: 1) having it
 as a plugin means that the majority of installations won't use it, which
 limits the utility of having FOAF support in the first place; 2) Paul's
 solution makes the information available via a distinct URL. In my view,
 this produces a bit of undesirable overhead: anyone who wants to use the
 data has to know the slug that the site admin has chosen, adding an extra
 step to the process of crawling for data on the site.

 My proposal is that we implement FOAF via RDFa, embedded directly in
 templates. Drupal is taking that very route in the Drupal 7 core. See this
 thread http://groups.drupal.org/node/16597 for the initial roadmap. The
 rough roadmap in that thread is similar to the way it would/could work in
 BuddyPress. We'd need to make sure that there was a programmatic way to
 add attributes dynamically to the important elements in the DOM, for
 instance something like

 {{{
 <ul id="members-list" class="item-list">
         <?php while ( bp_members() ) : bp_the_member(); ?>

                 <li <?php bp_the_member_list_item_attribute() ?>>
 }}}

 where bp_the_member_list_item_attribute() is a template tag that echos
 something like property="foaf:Person", but is filterable by plugins.

 We'd also need a way for admins to specify (optionally) which profile
 fields correspond to which FOAF attribute. I think that means collecting
 what we assume are the most commonly used vocabulary items from the spec
 http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/, then offering them to the admin at the time
 of profile field creation/editing.

 I can whip up a prototype, but it'd be nice to get some feedback in the
 meantime.

-- 
Ticket URL: <http://trac.buddypress.org/ticket/2738>
BuddyPress <http://buddypress.org/>
BuddyPress