Re: Wire Posts in bp 1.2
Andy, it sounds to me like you are storing the @ tag, you’re just storing it in the message content, which is what I don’t like.
You’re right that it is simple, which is good, but that doesn’t make it easy to use. A command line console is simple, and if you know the right commands it is efficient and easy to use. Yet, most people are confused by command lines. GUIs are far more user-friendly, but compared to a command line – a GUI is just UI bloat.
You said you plan on addressing the confusion between usernames and display names “probably though autocomplete, or accepting display names somehow.” I don’t know how you are going to do that without UI bloat.
I think the tag box idea minimizes UI bloat as much as possible, while keeping a healthy separation between content and meta data. I think that separation will be more important as BuddyPress develops and as more plugins are created.
Also, you said “It’s just a filter on the content that is posted to look for @mentions”. So, does that mean that every update message gets searched for the string “@rvenable” every time I want see my messages. Isn’t that going to get slow fast? Wouldn’t it be faster to have the message be stored in the DB with the user_id so you can just search a table of numbers instead of parsing thousands of string messages?
