Author Profile Pages
Document Actions
The author profile pages are to help users find out more about the authors that write content. It should help users relate to the author and be another way of finding content that will benefit them. The pages will also give authors a small area on the site to personalize.
Effect on Authors
Authors will now have a small area of the site that is their own. They can tell viewers about themselves. They can also use it as an area to advertise what types of content they are interested in. They can also use it to recommend content to other people. None of the fields, other than name and email, are required, so authors do not have to provide information they do not want to.
Editing a profile should be fairly simple. It is simply filling in fields in a form. Most of the fields just take a single input. The fields that are lists, take one input per line. Saving and updating is simple done with the "Save" button at the bottom of the page.
Effect on Readers
Readers will now have a way of finding out a little bit more about the authors that write content. They will now be able to see what interests and background the author is coming from, and what affiliation they have, if any. If the author has recommended any content, they can easily link to that.
The profile should encourage readers to visit other sections of the site. Most of the fields are links and will either link to search results or to another page that shows more information. There is a link to the all of the author's content for readers to easily see what they have done in the past.
Current Implementation
Currently, the author profile is viewed by a single page template that can be accessed by going to the URL /member_profile/"userid" The fields can be edited using the form at /personalize_form. This could be changed in the future if it grows too big to keep with all the default personalization items in that form. Every place the author's name is displayed has been changed to be a link to the profile so that it is very easy to readers to access the author's profile and find out more about them.
The current fields contained by the profile are:
- Fullname
- Homepage
- Affiliation (and URL)
- Preferred Language
- Alternative Languages
- Location
- Interests
- Recommended Content
- Biography
Last modified 2006-06-15 11:10
