Hi Mark,
I don't think that was a mistake in your part, you actually made ES the best choice for creating a social media system in Joomla IMHO. I have tried using JomSocial as our profile manager before on its early versions but it lacks the ability to give Admins the choice of what to open to users especially in the security side. It just assumed everything should be shared.
Think about website registrations including FB, Twitter, etc, the registration form are so simplified. Asking for only few information. If you are thinking of having one registration with ES which is the full registration, users will not have patience completing 2-3 pages of all those fields. But if you are thinking of replacing Quick Registration with the Full Registration but have the ability to customize the number of fields then that is perfect. But please make it work like how Quick Registration behaves right now especially on guest login so it can be called in that view instead of redirecting a user to the full registration view. In my experience users usually get lost when they are redirected and would ask, so where am I now. Guess people are getting more lazier now and the attention span is getting less and less
.
Some sites in 1.x, have enabled quick registration and only enabled the name field to appear and then submit a support ticket saying that registration is not working. This isn't entirely their fault, but it's ours because we introduce a settings which allow them to make mistakes.
Mark, my two cents on this is
a website admin who don't read, research, play with settings and complains that the system does not work is... I don't know what to say
. But personally I am willing to help them until they fully understand how Joomla and ES system works. But I won't take that as the reason why ES has to be streamlined to the point that it will be so understandable to those who don't need to do their homework on understanding a system. Changing/Adding how things work logically that would make sense is I am for. IMO and look at ES is, it is not for someone who just understand what Social Media is, but rather it is for someone who understand Social Media and knows a bit technically and willing to learn and understand how things work and not expect that they bought this system with a promise to do this, turned it on and expect it to work like what they think it should work.
Mark, remember when you guys released ES or during the first beta version, which I was already active here because I am seeing a Joomla developer who don't cut corners on their development of Joomla Product. I felt WOW! that time (still do
) seeing every little things that I can think of, you guys covered an option for it or worked on UI making it look professional. I think it's right to say that there are Joomla Developers that are good with programming but some of them are not with UI or too lazy (maybe, otherwise) to make their product looks professional.
If you are a developer, then I guess it shouldn't be too difficult to create template overrides. We probably need to get recaptcha supported in quick registrations and you can then display it using template overrides. At least the variables would be there.
I personally would welcome a route to enable developers/technically inclined the ability to control other aspects of how data are displayed via template overrides. But please don't just think of your clients who rely so much on backend settings to make ES work for them. But going this route means someone on your side has to work on API documentation
. I volunteer if you need some help.
Thanks for listening Mark,
Jackson