@ links (mentions)
-
Have been working on my forum recently, and I have though tof something I’d like to add to it.
Now, I’m no plugin developer, or PHP junkie, but I’d like to know what steps would be needed to turn @ links (mentions, like those found on Twitter) into links that take the user to a members profile page/or maybe even the member’s website (if any).
Example:
‘@matt’ would become ‘@matt‘
It would obviously have to scan through the post, check for any mentions, check if the user exists, and if it does, then apply the link. Now, I have no idea how this would be implemented – I hope to learn more soon.
This may not be a very great idea to have for a bbPress forum, but I think it would be nice. Could anyone help me with this?
Peace, Michael
-
BBprogress had two versions of this one mate, they should still be kicking around somewhere. The first one used Ajax to convert the links (it pinged a search page for @username).
That said… My issue with it at the time is my issue with what you’re trying to achieve as well. 9/10 when someone is typing “@Michael R” they are replying to a post above. To that end, the “@Michael R” should link to that post, not to the person’s profile page. What you effectively need is a “reply to” button as well as a “quote” button that pre populates the “@Michael R” information.
Writing that functionality isn’t a problem (check out the quote plugin), but rather that there is no hook in BBpress that doesn’t hardcode output from the core to the bottom of each post. Not only would you need a plugin, but you’d also need a theme with additional hooks/function calls.
Its definitely doable though, once yu have defined exactly what it is you’re after/the need is for it
Great – thanks Gautam. Looking forward to it.
(Are you maybe calling it bbMentions? 
)
Nice
Replying to kevinjohngallagher’s post (maybe its in spam, but I got an email notification as I am subscribed to topic):
1) Making “@” links is cool, and very “twitter generation”, even if its not something that’s totally globalised yet. But the “@” link is not pointing at what you’re replying to. We’re faking the functionality without the reasoning, which in the end will just confuse users.
On Twitter, you post on your profile page. People read it on their feed, and reply on their own Profile page. So a link to “@kev” goes to the page where “kev” has written his post. That’s the point of it, to link to someone’s post.
Here, we’re making the link “@kev” go to “/profiles/kev/” for the user to not see the post. That’s exactly the opposite of the purpose of the “‘@” linking system
–> That’s basically the work of a reply plugin, not of a mentioning plugin. I also have future plans with the plugin like linking
#tag, etc. Even if I do something like that which you have mentioned, then a single user can make multiple posts, then which post will the plugin link to?2) The other issue is that Twitter names don’t have spaces, while BBpress / wordpress names can. So if i write “@Michael R Thanks for your reply”, how does the plugin know where the username ends? What if it finds a “michael” in the usertable, it will then link “@Michael” to “/profiles/michael/” and the message will read “R Thanks for your reply”. In Twitter, it parses at the first space; but we can’t do that here.
Oh that will also involve looping through queries until you find a match, so first for Michael, then for Michael R, then for Michael R Thanks etc. Ofcourse there could/should be a word/search limit – either way there is huge potential for database issues there. Imagine adding up to 5 sql searches, per “@” per post, per page load.
The initial solution, and i suppose this is for Gautam, is to make a search of the user table for all users who have posted on the topic being replied to, which should narrow it down considerably, though it should be noted that if you have “Michael” and “Michael R”, or any similar naming issues, the plugin will not know that…
–> That can’t be helped. The plugin first checks if that username exists, if not, then checks if that nicename exists. This will be also mentioned on the plugin page.
3) You are effectively allowing a user to search your database for anything you put after your “@” symbol. Now this one is a little bit of scaremongering, but we’ve all seen bad coding before. What if I write “@drop table wp_usermeta hi bob, how much fun would this be
“. There is a reason that we try to make sure we don’t take database queries from the user.–> 1) This is what is used to match the username – /[@]+([A-Za-z0-9-_]+)/, so there is no point of mysql commands going in there.
If you want to test the plugin (how it works), you are free to use this as sandbox – http://forum.gaut.am/
I have made some posts to test the plugin here.
Gautam, this looks great. Can’t wait to try it out.
That can’t be helped. The plugin first checks if that username exists, if not, then checks if that nicename exists. This will be also mentioned on the plugin page.
Is there no way to test as far as three spaces in (until it finds a username)?
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.
