Announcing support of user avatars in a community application is pretty much a non-event. On the other hand, user Avatars in Sueetie are pretty darned interesting because they serve as an illustrative example of Sueetie’s member-centric capabilities that sit atop a loosely-coupled application model. User avatars for everybody!
Here’s a screenshot of the User Site Photo update page now online at http://sueetie.org.
Notice the avatar in the upper-right banner area. The user’s photo is displayed across the Sueetie Community, regardless of the application. It is also supported throughout Sueetie Groups.
What’s really cool about the site-wide display of user avatars in Sueetie is that to support it I needed to start building out Sueetie.Core. Specifically, to support User Avatars we needed a site Configuration class, a Context model, Caching, and a Data Provider. Here’s a photo of Sueetie.Core for 3/15/2009.
Okay, now what’s really, really cool about User Avatars is that the process of constructing the Sueetie.Core essentials gave me the opportunity to dig into the Open Source apps that comprise Sueetie. (As stated in the Manifesto, Sueetie doesn’t use the source code of commercial .NET applications, not even for reference.) The three apps that most directly influenced the construction of Sueetie.Core were BlogEngine.NET (with a very lean approach to the data provider), YetAnotherForum.NET (for caching and context), and Gallery Server Pro (for image processing and ideas on multi-application site configuration handling.)
Here’s a shot of YetAnotherForum’s target rich Classes.Utils source library, for instance. Good references here on how Jaben Cargman and the YAF.NET team addressed the requirements that Sueetie or any robust ASPNET application would need. Classes referenced in Sueetie are circled. I should remind folks unfamiliar with YetAnotherForum that it’s known for its raw speed, and studying the source tells the story.
As always, new Sueetie features are first demonstrated at http://sueetie.org. Then I’ll port them to Project Gummybear at http://gummybear.sueetie.org and in the process create the source ZIPs and application DIFFs for CodePlex distribution, along with the documentation for the Sueetie Wiki. Since Sueetie is still strictly an after-hours venture, I’ll try to have the source, diffs and docs available in a week or so. It may be a little longer, because there are several interesting aspects of building User Avatar support that I want to blog about while they’re fresh. This will probably be a big Sueetie blogging week.
Please head on over to Sueetie.org and provide a site photo. I used Facebook dimensions of 200x200 for the profile photo and 60x60 for the thumbnail, so give us a big fat photo to look your best. We can handle it.