Symphony.

I've been using Symphony on/off for the past few months and have noticed some sites; who are now including a lot more social media information about staff, artists etc; have cluttered sections with a text field for every social platform link the person may have.

It would be great to hear if anyone else is having similar problems and has any good ideas about how to overcome it. I was thinking something on the lines of;

A field which can add/remove social platforms usernames and links. (Like subsection-manager interface)

Available social platforms are enabled/disabled in 'field' settings. The validator can also be set; i.e. username, link or both; so the extension can be used in less social intensive applications as a time saver / easy-to-use field for users.

Minimise repetition of URL and username by auto-generating URL (vice-versa) based on the information given - some will need to have this featured disabled - i.e. facebook does not automatically create a URL with a username so we cannot presume facebook.com/username will work.

Some way of plugging-in new social media platforms into the extension.

Return basic XML like so;

<social-media>
  <twitter>
    <link>http://twitter.com/username</link>
    <username>username</username>
  </twitter>
  <facebook>
    <link>http://facebook.com/username</link>
    <username>username</username>
  </facebook>
</social-media>

It would be great to hear peoples own experiences before I start anything as I see it as a great time saver for my work.

I think it would hand the input power over to the client while providing us devs/designers with a consistent format of output, which is easily extendible and integrable with third-party services.

Thanks

J

They aren't socially "aware" but take a look at Dynamic Text Group (see parts 1, 2 and 3) and the Meta Keys extension. They allow for these repeatable fields. With a little bit of regex support you could enforce rules (e.g. prevent a client pasting in a full URL when they should be entering the username).

Looks great, but it maybe a bit too ambiguous for website authors who won't necessarily stick to a naming standard.

Not personally too fused about social media but its been a common request - do you think designers would find it easier to have a plug and play module for this?

I'll definitely look into using the dynamic text group as a basis though - thanks a lot for sharing.