I would like users with a given role to be able to create their own droplets.

I think you might have been asked for this before (when I first researched MySite) but I'm stuffed if I can find the link again on Google. So, I'm making it a bit more official.

Many thanks!

Rob

Comments

agentrickard’s picture

The subject has come up before. This is an interesting request, and it will take some re-engineering of the module.

We have to add a new permission 'add droplets' -- and possibly change some droplet behavior. Questions.

- If a user adds a droplet, who can add that to their page? Only the user who added it?
- If a user adds a droplet, who can edit that droplet?
- When a user adds a droplet, the filters they can use will be role-based. Currently the assumption is that people who can add droplets can also enter Full HTML and PHP code. Not sure we want to open that up to end-users.

I'm still hesitant to add this feature for a few reasons:

- It seems like a lot of work for a small use case.
- Misuse of the feature opens up lots of potential security holes (XSS from malicious JS being the most obvious).
- Services like iGoogle and MyYahoo don't allow it.

What types of user do you have in mind here?

roblang’s picture

You raise some excellent points. My use case is indeed quite narrow.

My users are all expert-types. The sort of person who would "write their own drupal" if they could think of a better way of doing it and had the time! I don't really want to give them all admin access because of the comedic power they'd have over other people's pages and droplets. A little bit of power to mess up their own stuff is fine but too much is asking for it.

Ideally, a user adding a droplet would only add their own as the user-specific droplet is for their own use. The example case is adding a YouTube 'My Videos' droplet (from the user homepage of YouTube, not the google gadget). The code is specific to each user and they would add their very own YouTube video app. There is no generic way of doing this, unfortunately. Only that user would be able to edit the droplet.

Another possibility would be for an admin to create a droplet that a user could specify parameters to. The admin writes the PHP to generate the droplet, making use of the parameters they've specified. When the user adds the droplet to their page, they'd be required to add a number of parameters. You could then have the YouTube PHP generating code and the user would pass in the unique ID that YouTube gave them.

In retrospect, I can't see many people using this and there is a reasonable work around (have the admins make them). So perhaps not as worthwhile as it first looked.

If I think of anything else that might be cool, I'll let you know.

agentrickard’s picture

I agree with this part:

Another possibility would be for an admin to create a droplet that a user could specify parameters to. The admin writes the PHP to generate the droplet, making use of the parameters they've specified. When the user adds the droplet to their page, they'd be required to add a number of parameters. You could then have the YouTube PHP generating code and the user would pass in the unique ID that YouTube gave them.

I think this needs to be supported, but it's tough to handle all the possible use-cases. So this development while take some time, especially since multiple pages and the port to D6 are both higher priority.

You could write a YouTube type plugin that implements its own configuration settings.

agentrickard’s picture

Status: Active » Closed (won't fix)