User extras

[rossjones]

CKAN would benefit from having a better way of handling user profiles so that core and customised instances can have more control of what information they store against the user.

[rossjones]

User Stories

As a developer I want to store information about my users' social user accounts (twitter name, facebook profile etc).

As a developer I would like to be able to group my users into non-auth related groups but have nowhere to store the 'tag' I want to give users.

As a developer I want to implement social authn and require somewhere to store the relevant tokens.

[davidread]

Some sort of UserExtra?

[rossjones]

I think that would be ideal (Package style extras rather than Resource style extras).

[davidread]

As Ross said https://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/ckan-dev/2016-January/009579.html :

[User-extras] would be very useful to have in CKAN. It's been discussed a few times and it's definitely something that with a few tiny changes and a couple of tests would be a fantastic contribution to core.

Of course everyone could just use the [https://github.com/OCHA-DAP/hdx-ckan/tree/dev/ckanext-hdx_user_extra] plugin directly, but I feel it is probably a better fit in CKAN itself (as the extras are already available on groups, packages and resources), and it would make migrations easier. And then implementing things like social-login could be done knowing that it was available, rather than having plugins relying on plugins.

If you need any help, guidance or suggestions for getting the PR into CKAN, please don't hesitate to shout here on the list or on the IRC #ckan channel.