IndiewebPress: Users

This is the one of a series of brainstorming posts I am putting out about how major functional Core changes to WordPress could result in an improved experience for those interested in pursuing Indieweb philosophies in WordPress.

In the Indieweb world, your domain is your identity. This would suggest that most WordPress sites should only have one user…representing the identity of the site. Users, however, represent roles and responsibilities within the system, not necessarily content creators.

In an update to the ‘official’ Indieweb plugin, I, with some encouragement, added the idea of designating a specific user as the ‘identity’ of the site…assuming there was one.  But let’s expand that idea a bit. We have user metadata, we have the ability to define new roles and capabilities. So, what can we do with this but create new possibilities? We can better work what a role is, and add additional properties and behavior to improve the system.

There is a setting for an admin email, for which the suggestion to expand outward has been proposed for 8 years in this vein. This should be a property of any administrative account.

I have an idea I’ve long wanted to implement. It is based on a feature used by Postmatic. People who subscribed to the email service they provided would end up as users on your site. I’d like to see enhancements to the user profile. When trying to add other site profiles to user metadata, I discovered that this being left to the plugins has resulted in a complete lack of consistency.

There needs to be a consistent structure to add data to support URLs on specific other types of sites( for example, Twitter), or every plugin is going to have to retread this. This is the trouble we have with all metadata unfortunately.

That idea of using the user table for outside visitors has a lot of good potential. Commenters could create a profile on your site that could be imported from elsewhere…namely your own website. There is a certain level of trust there, because you would be displaying images and text about a person from another site…however, that is what gravatar does. Why not allow people to do it from their own site?

Gravatar itself is something that WordPress wouldn’t have put in today….a reliance on an outside service. The local avatar trac ticket is also a rather old request. It is time to look at avatars in general…to build a robust local system that is enhanced by gravatar…gravatar should not be that system. We can add in modern themeable profiles for users, as opposed to just archive pages. We can make a much better system for users.

The whole point of the ‘subscriber’ role in WordPress is for people not part of the blog to have an account they can do something with…follow the site, get updates, participate in comments…but this part of WordPress is woefully underused.