Other than the basic constructors and selectors, I'd like to be able to get ordered lists of person_ids, where the persons are ordered by first or last name; also, I want to be able to find a person by name, find all persons who have a given last_name or persons who have a given first name in their first_names column.
I'd like for a person to be able to have a list of secondary emails, each having a send-to radio button flag: any message which would be sent to the user would be sent to the selected email address, either instead of, or in addition to, the primary address. The person should have the option of showing any, all or -none- of his/her email addresses. If none, then the only emails sent by the server to the person's primary email address and/or selected secondary address would be alerts and admin. Hence, the person can still participate in collaborative activities as facilitated by the site without getting spammed by anyone.
Finally, bboard postings should appear to originate from the original poster, NOT the server (as is the case with openacs.org). The subject line of the email should be the item to identify to the mail recipient that the email came from a particular thread of a particular forum. Perhaps this should be optional: an email sender should be able to say to the server "cloak my address" or "bboard notifications of messages I post should appear to originate from me". In any case, openacs.org doesn't tell me who the poster is (maybe I want to filter spam on the basis of email address), which thread this is part of (maybe I want to try to form a threadded offline list to read) or what forum the message comes from (maybe I want to put messages from certain forums into a local folder).
Yes, OK, so I went a little off the "persons tcl api" track... however, if any of this more-general preferences statement leaks into the persons api, and if said api becomes better for it, that's good enough for me :)
