I don’t really know php, I have some familiarity with C. I want to write a module for Open Source Social Network, it would allow users to edit their profiles to identify with ~9 lists of predefined tags, and it would allow users to search for each other using those tags to refine the search. If anyone could help point me in the right direction, what functionality of php should I learn to create this? Thanks!
Check out the docs or community for the app and see if you can find a “getting started with modules” or even a module starter project. Then look into how you hook into both the search and the templates. And for bonus points, check any guidelines so you know you’re doing things by the book
To accomplish this you would need to do several things.
The database tables for the users would need to have fields added for your 9 tags. Or one additional field could be added with coding for all 9 tags.
The profile editor on the site would need changing to allow the user to select his tags.
(I looked into the OSSN site and this would be done in the “/u/administrator/edit” area. That is the profile update page as far as I see in their live demo.)
Then, you would need to create an advanced search section on the left side under the original search area.
If you use the current search, it goes to this page: “/search?q=members” Note the arguments show the items searched for. You would need to add your tags to the search.php page so that the user could limit his/her search by the tags you created. Then, the search code would need to add these to the search arguments.
This does not look like a big job. Have you created your list of tags yet? Have you reviewed any of the PHP code in the template itself? I would look at those pages first and see how they look to you. If you know C, you will understand a lot about PHP already. PHP does not need to define things in the same way C does, so it is easier in some ways.
Just some thoughts about how to start… Hope it helps.
PS: I looked at the docs and scanned a lot of pages and did not see much on this search add-on… But, lots of programmers were active on the community so maybe someone has created this already. Did not find it for you though.