Eyefood

Perhaps a misleading title. Oh well.

One of the features that everyone kept asking me for in our ePortfolio tool, was the ability to have private groups. Being able to link together different people and pieces of work, and form discussions around them is fun … but it’s useful sometimes to be able to do that without the glare of the outside world looking in.

(Interestingly, sorry, it’s like a mini-version of the site itself - which is visible only from the inside. Privacy within privacy, he said, digressing)

It wasn’t as hard as I thought it was going to be, when I actually got down to it today (which is usually the case. As long as I can remember how I wrote something in the first place, I can usually change it slightly to add new features). In this case, it was just a question of having a ‘privacy flag’ in the database (which was already there, what with me being a bit more fore-planning this time), and the right checks on group-membership and overall-authentication-levels (and stuff). Wrap it all in an if(), and make sure that all the places where they would normally show up are covered.

Bingo.

Cute huh? The red dots are the private groups, and the orange ones are the ones that are invite-only (to join), but visible to everyone else.

What struck me as a useful thing to do next though, was to be able to specify privacy levels on pieces of work themselves. Things like “public, private, tutors-only, friends-only”. I did wonder a while back about how relevant this sort of thing would be, and erred towards a “Open and Free For All” approach … but I’m starting to think that there are very obvious reasons why thing might want to be private (not least, using the site as a handy place to stick images to reuse on blogs - like I did with the one at the top there)

Anyway, we’ll see how this pans out. Something that did strike me earlier though, was a large sense of ‘community‘ when I was using it a moment ago. I think there’s a significant sense of being part of something because of the Site.

I should write more about that some time.

Tags: cagd, community, development, privacy