Forum OpenACS Improvement Proposals (TIPs): Re: TIP #133: Change "bio" from being generic storage in "person" to type-specific storage in "user".

If the code only supports bios for actual users, perhaps it should be changed? It would seem that if there's any rationale for keeping the person abstraction around, it's the place for a bio, no? Not intentionally trying to stir things up but this will come into play when we start thinking about where we're going to attach the profile attributes. (I lean towards person on this issue and that would make NO sense if bio is part of a user type).
the whole party/person/user abstraction, while a good one, is poorly implemented and messy.

If I leave it in person, less code needs changing, in fact the Tcl API needn't change a bit.

I'll leave it there for now and if some day people want to have a global argument about the person vs. user abstraction I'll sit and watch :)

I was kinda hoping to engender that global argument, Don :) I guess I didn't do a good enough job of stirring things up.

Don and I chatted about this offline and yes, there are multiple instances of developers adding columns in the wrong place (it appears 'users' has become the dumping ground for *anything* related to parties, even for data that relates to columns stored at other levels in the type hierarchy like, say, email). Don clarified one misconception I had about the person type per Lars' (author) intent, which was apparently for it to be a place to hold minimal amount of data on parties that are not yet full-blown users. With portrait and bio hanging off that type, it seemed to me that it was more like the place to hang non-account related attributes. I kind of liked that way of looking at it but, well, as Don pointed out, the whole situation is a little messy and has been muddied by developers over the years.

Anybody have strong (uh... or any) feelings on the matter?

Oh yeah, approved :)