Seattle Wordpress Meetup!
Feb. 9th, 2011 10:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsWent to the Seattle Wordpress Meetup. That was actually not as interesting as it seemed; the presentation was a rah-rah "follow your passion" meeting about quitting your job and doing what you thought was cool-- in the case of this guy, designing and selling Wordpress themes.
I had a few good conversations during the networking, although it was clear that unless I was a deep Wordpress Developer, or a total beginner desperate for advice. I was in the middle ground-- I've developed a few themes, and even two plug-ins, but I didn't want to do it for a living and I didn't need much advice.
I was very disappointed to learn that the XML-RPC interface for Wordpress requires that the username and password be passed in the clear with each and every transaction. Like other log-in routines, it ought to happen exactly once and a session-id with a cookie used for every transaction thereafter.
Maybe what Wordpress needs now is a decent and somewhat secure JSON interface. It could be done: PHP has a native JSON client now. IMCST™
In other news, I had the insight into why "Currency" and "Balance" (as in how much currency a user has) are the great abstractions of gamification. Basically, your site has a few currencies. Take StackOverflow for an excellent example of game mechanics as cascading information: you have your actions (you ask, you answer, you edit, you vote, you comment) and the actions of others (they reply, they assent, they agree, etc. etc.). The count of each of these is an individual currency. Each user has a balance, which is a tuple: (site, currency, user's balance). The balance can be any number, and in some cases one is all you need to earn something. So it's "Sites have currencies, users have a balance, and the table in the middle is the intersection of what kind of balance the user has."
It makes great sense when drawn on paper. A database implementation would take a day. IMCST™
I had a few good conversations during the networking, although it was clear that unless I was a deep Wordpress Developer, or a total beginner desperate for advice. I was in the middle ground-- I've developed a few themes, and even two plug-ins, but I didn't want to do it for a living and I didn't need much advice.
I was very disappointed to learn that the XML-RPC interface for Wordpress requires that the username and password be passed in the clear with each and every transaction. Like other log-in routines, it ought to happen exactly once and a session-id with a cookie used for every transaction thereafter.
Maybe what Wordpress needs now is a decent and somewhat secure JSON interface. It could be done: PHP has a native JSON client now. IMCST™
In other news, I had the insight into why "Currency" and "Balance" (as in how much currency a user has) are the great abstractions of gamification. Basically, your site has a few currencies. Take StackOverflow for an excellent example of game mechanics as cascading information: you have your actions (you ask, you answer, you edit, you vote, you comment) and the actions of others (they reply, they assent, they agree, etc. etc.). The count of each of these is an individual currency. Each user has a balance, which is a tuple: (site, currency, user's balance). The balance can be any number, and in some cases one is all you need to earn something. So it's "Sites have currencies, users have a balance, and the table in the middle is the intersection of what kind of balance the user has."
It makes great sense when drawn on paper. A database implementation would take a day. IMCST™
