[wp-hackers] Custom taxonomies for authors

[Dougal Campbell]

On Mar 13 2010 4:15 PM, Mike Schinkel wrote:
> On Mar 13, 2010, at 3:57 PM, Patrik Bóna wrote:
>    
>> On WPMU you have own post table for each site but just one user table for all sites.
>>
>> So if you will put users in posts table you will have trouble ;).
>>      
>
> Sigh.  I covered that already in an earlier post to this list.  Only mirror users that have rights to a WPMU blog into that blog, simple as that. It would just not make sense to copy user "John" in the posts table for user "Mary"'s blog.
>    

But if you are copying user data from blog-to-blog "as needed", you 
break single-sign-on, right? And further, you now can have user 'foo' on 
Blog A that is not the same as user 'foo' on Blog B. That's not 
necessarily a bad thing in all situations, but it's definitely not 
backwards-compatible. Assuming the goal is a backwards-compatible 
refactoring, how would you propose syncing the user data? Would there be 
some special-case user record that acts as a pointer to the userid & 
blogid of the "master" user record? That's the only thing that comes to 
mind right now, and to that I'd say yuck. Special case exceptions are 
the devil.

> The reason to consider this is that when people represent content they should have a post type to contain that content.  And I argue for it being in core (or a canonical plugin) because information about people is so universal that it probably applies to every WordPress install out there. Getting it into core means lots of people would build additional support for a person post type; not having it there means much less and in incompatible ways.
>    

I think a key phrase here is 'when people represent content'. I think 
the difficulty with this idea is conflating the concept of a 'user' with 
'information about a user'. Personally, I still think that the use-cases 
for moving user data into the posts table are outside the norm.

I do, however, like the idea of being able to relate custom taxonomies 
to a user. And if you want to be able to tie more data to a user, what 
about a custom post type? I could see making a 'user-bio' post type, and 
maybe even overloading the post_parent field to tie to the userid 
instead of to a postid... (but then, that's a special case exception, 
isn't it?)

-- 
Dougal Campbell <dougal at gunters.org>
http://dougal.gunters.org/
http://twitter.com/dougal
http://twitual.com/