Member Account Specific Module or Block

Worker Joined: Aug 22, 2006 Posts: 192

I am running my website using Raven's RavenNuke(tm) v2.02.02 Distro release and NukeSentinel(tm) 2.4.2pl5.

I am looking for a module or block, (or even better BOTH), that is specific to each account user once they have logged in.

To clafiry, I want to send a video & audio stream to members of my site who sign up for the service. However the content of each individual stream will be customised to each individual members preferences, (i.e they will not all be viewing the same content/stream). So for this reason, when a member signs in to their account, the information displayed/stream shown, must be their personal one.

I do realise that I will have to customise the codeing and content of the actual module or block as it is highly unlikely I am going to find one that ALSO has the facility for displaying streaming, that I will require.

Any ideas on this guys?

Posted: Sat Apr 21, 2007 7:24 pm

What criteria are you using to determine which feed they get?
Are you altering the feed depending on their sex? age? or something else?
I'm trying to find an easy solution.

Posted: Sun Apr 22, 2007 5:43 am

Hi Guardian...Lets assume that I will be supplying each member a video feed of a webcam, but it would be a webcam local to where they are based.

The feed that each users is receiving will always be the same and the user will not need/be given the option to change what they are seeing. I assumed that I would set up the feed they are going to receive once they have signed up and paid for the service, so this should not be a problem as I would 'hard code' thier specific Block/Module at this time with the correct URL/Link.

There will be a few 'common' feeds/webcams that ALL MEMBERS, (and maybe non-members) would be able to view, however I assume this is the easy part, (as I think you will agree), as I would plan to make a module/block with these feeds available on and make sure it is accessible by all users all of the time.

The only problem I forsee working in the way I have suggested is that I will ned to create a new block/module for each member and if the website becomes very popular, (which of course I would like it to do), the number of blocks/modules could reach a rediculous amount.

That is basically it.

What other info would be useful to you in order to contemplate the best solution here?

Posted: Sun Apr 22, 2007 6:31 am

Well from what you have written, the easiest short terms solution would be to use the Groups functionality.
You would need to create one block per feed then just set the access permission to for the block to that Group.
Lets say you create 3 Groups;
South America
North America
Canada
United Kingdom
You would then create three blocks (use similar names to help you find them) then just set the access permission for block-SouthAmerica.php to the Group South America.

For the 'everyone can see the feed' just put those in a block thats set for Registered Only permissions.
I would NOT recommend you have any feeds set to Anonymous, they will get spidered and if you are hosting the feeds, the bandwidth is going to get very expensive.

For a more long term solution, you would need a way for users to store the country or State or Town or City of origin (depending on your needs). To save hacking things about too much, they could set this in their Forum profile which has a 'location' field.
Then all you ned to do is create a new database table to store the feed links and write a small routine to get the correct feed depending on what it is the 'location' of the users profile.

If you wanted someone to do this work for you, you might be better posting in the For Hire forum. If you don't need an administration interface and are happy to input the feed url's directly into phpmyadmin yourself then it shouldn't take more than a couple of hours work - if you can find someone eho has a couple of hours to spare.

Posted: Sun Apr 22, 2007 8:35 am

Guardian,

Thanks for that detailed reply.

The only problem with these ideas however is that I anticipate most of the feeds to be on a 'one-to-one' basis, and only occasionally will a registered member/user want access to a 'comon' feed.

Put another way, all new registered members/users will require at least one feed that is specific to them alone.

So my point is that in this scenario, the MAJORITY of the registered users/members will be requiring a 'personal'/individual block/module and if the service proves popular then again there wil be many blocks/modules that will require authoring.

One idea I just thought about is that Nuke comes with a 'User's custom box' which can be switched on and off when a user is logged in to their account. Do you think it would be possible for me to utilise this and simply 'code' each new registered users/members block with the correct code to make this look like a block (which would also include the link/URL to their specific feed)?

Can you think of any unforseen issues there could be using this as a possible solution?

One current problem I am having is that this block will not accept more than 255 characters, so coding this to look anything reasonable right now is apparently imposible. I mean, I can currently author links in this 'User's custom box' facility, but if I try to customise it any further than about 2 or 3 links, there doesnt seem to be the capacity for the extra coding.

Posted: Sun Apr 22, 2007 9:32 am

You could try changing the field type.
The user custom menu you describe is stored in the nuke_users table within the field 'ublock'.
ublock is currently set as TINYTEXT which has a maximum byte capacity of 256 so in phpmyadmin or other utility, you could try changing the field type to MEDIUMTEXT - don't forget to set a maximum limit in the 'length/Value' column as this field can handle about 16Mb if I remember correctly, so set it to something reasonably like 512 or 1024.
Keep in mind that your user can edit this in Your Account so don't give them too much to play with.

Posted: Sun Apr 22, 2007 9:38 am

Guardian,

I think I am one step ahead here as far as the fact the user can edit the information in their 'User's custom box' from the 'Your Account' section.

I thought about this and my solution would be to simply remove the code that allows for the check box and field relating to this facility to be displayed, from the Your Account module.

How does this sound to you? Again do you think I may have overlooked something here that makes my idea 'unsafe' (e.g. for security), impractical or a bad option?

Posted: Sun Apr 22, 2007 10:23 am

Th only thing I can think of is if the external feed you are linking to changes. You have no control over the security of a third party site so proved their sites doesnt get cmpromised I do not immediately envisage any problems.

Posted: Sun Apr 22, 2007 1:12 pm

Please correct me if I have misunderstood, but is what you are needing not so much a "customized" feed but a way to make sure that only one person is viewing the same feed at any one time, as would be needed in the case of a "one-on-one" web cam service?

I "think" that might be doable with a "generic" type of block and basing on the member IP (last i.p. information is already stored in the "users" table).
I was thinking IP as sometime people are not always, umm, "accurate" with their location information in profiles and since IP is already detected automatically, why not use it.

You could then create a custom database table for the feed information with the feed link, location, "public or private" field (for the common feeds you mentioned), and an "available" field which gets updated as members log in and out.
Country ip information is already in the Sentinel table, which could be queried for a broad geolocation and then your custom table queried for available feeds.

Using almost the same type of setup with some minor modifications, you could also assign a single feed to specific members based upon profile information (age, sex, occupation, etc.) by modifying the queries and custom table a bit.

This could, in theory, be done using a single module with "public" and "private" blocks and limit the required manual work to updating the feed information if it changes and shouldn't require hacking existing code or "hard coding" your feed links.

This pretty much just came off the top of my head and is extremely "rough" in concept.
Please accept my apologies if I am totally mis-understanding.