@bplove @crashutah
One of the reasons this plugin is taking so long to complete is that we’re building a very sophisticated security and privacy model for it that handles the sort of things that people do on *real* websites ..and these become very, very complicated situations to handle.
I mean, consider just a “simple” group album.
Let’s say you have a user with two albums: “Private” and “Public” who is a member of two groups “Naughty” and “Nice”. The user sets the “Private” album to be viewable to friends only, and the “Public” album to be visible by everyone. Meanwhile the “Naughty” group is visible only to members, while the “Nice” group is visible to everyone.
So first off, we need to ensure that when a user uploads images to the “Private” album, it generates activity stream posts, but they are only visible to the user’s friends. Next we must make sure that when the user posts images to the “Naughty” group, those images generate activity stream posts *that are only visible to members of that group*, and when the user posts images to the “Public” album or the “Nice” group, they’re visible to everyone.
Then we have to handle the situation of contributing images to groups. The “nice” group lets everyone upload, so their images are auto-approved. But the “Naughty” group only shows images after the admin approves them. The activity posts have to be synchronized to that as well …you don’t want to post an image to the activity stream that nobody can view.
Then we have to answer the question of “When an image is posted to a group, who owns the image”. Does it belong to the group? or does it belong to the user? Because a group admin should be allowed to remove inappropriate files, but what happens if that file is the only copy in existence because the member that contributed it’s camera was stolen?
And what happens if the user decides they want to contribute an image from the “Private” album to the “Nice” group? Now we have to resolve conflicting security permissions, because the images in that album are only visible to friends of the user, but the “Nice” group is a public group.
Should group owners be allowed to request images to be added to their group? How do we deal with an annoying user that repeatedly submits an image to a group, even though its been declined by the group admin? What about group admins that want a user to be a member of the group, but don’t want them to be allowed to upload images? How about groups that only want admins to be able to upload images?
And what do we do if a user has contributed hundreds of images to groups, but then decides to delete their account? Do we let the groups keep the images, or do we delete all their uploaded content? And if we don’t delete all their content, what happens if a spammer uploads hundreds of ad images to every group on the site?
And on and on.
We have huge design documents that explain all these problems. Here’s the one for group albums:
http://code.google.com/p/buddypress-media/issues/detail?id=5
So sure, you can go with other plugins. We won’t be upset. It’s not like we’re losing your business or something…lol.
Actually, we’re building this plugin for *us* and *our* sites.
But if you do pick a different plugin, keep in mind the kind of issues you could be up against in the future if *your* site is successful!
At some point it becomes impossible to go in and manually deal with all these scenarios …because you have 10,000 users… and then you end up making developers like me rich writing custom code to fix your site. The reason we’re putting so much time into getting things right is because we’ve been through these sorts of problems like 8 times before with other sites and applications …and we want to get it right the *first* time with this plugin.
So, why not spend some more time working on your site layout while we get the plugin finished, or perhaps if you’re really keen, help us with testing it.
Thanks!
^F^
