UNA And The Old MySpace Concept
I was interested in the way that the old original MySpace worked back in the day when we could use html and css to customize our user profiles, and for the life of me why MySpace overhauled itself and did away with that I can not understand since that is still to this day an interesting concept. I later found Dolphin and like the fact that you could do that with Dolphin, however I settled on UNA and it is my hope that someone will consider adding to UNA the EVO theme concept, even the EVO default background. I believe that in doing so, UNA will become something that many who are interesting in alternatives to Facebook and Twitter will want to make use of. UNA with its Rich Text Editor for Post is what I consider to be its strength in terms of such platforms as GAB Social and Parler, which can not compare. Now as for Design templates, I know that UNA has the ability for me the Admin to do some stuff and provide a selection of themes for user to select, but I still like the idea of the users being able to customize their profiles. Also, Dolphin allowed us to use animated gif images for the background but UNA will not animate those images, I have tried that. I hope someone considers what I am saying, and if you come up with something let me know.
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Profile customisation is fun, but it is NOT a mainstream feature. It may add a lot of complexity, security considerations and usability issues. For some sites it may be a suitable feature though, and I am sure that we'll have some limited profile customisation tools eventually. With that said, I am looking forward to modules and templates from 3rd party providers offering extended customisation features. Ideally we'd like to concentrate on UNA framework capabilities, including core performance, APIs and configuration tools, while allowing more vendors to come up with frontend functionality and visual customisation tools.
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MySpace did away with that most likely for security issues. If you allow public HTML insertion, you would have to take measures not to allow any JS or executable code. And it would have to most likely be BASIC HTML functionality. You can do some crazy stuff with HTML5+CSS these days, without even getting into any JS/jquery. Kind of a pain for backend programmers.
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I do not remember MySpace allowing javascripts to run on a profile. And I would not want that either. The Dolphin method of customizing profiles was fine, allowing for different background colors or images, and css changes to the blocks boarders and fonts. I think custom css would work fine. All sources of css would have to be tested and people would have to obtain that from a trusted source. A separate page for entering css changes would be in order for a profile in case the user broke their profile and had to reset it. I can see a html purifier filter needing to be implemented with this idea.
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You could have a predefined set of colors (or an option to enter a hex number), border widths, etc., and just let the user choose from those defined items in the settings. Bypass the "allowed HTML/CSS" altogether. It would still allow a large number of creative styles, depending on how many things were allowed to be customized.
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I remember the days of Myspace profiles with purple flowers on pink background, 1 megabyte tiled images, that would take an hour to load over a 56K dial up connection. Myspace didn't even have the sense to downsize the background images people used, and watching some pages load would bring a person to tears. Myspace found out the hard way that most people using a social platform are aestheticallly challenged... what may look good to one person, will probably look hideous to many others. That sort of thing would only have mass appeal to children that don't play outdoors enough.
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Yes, good point. As a network operator you have to appreciate the fact that very few people can come up with what most people will perceive as good looking web page. Moreover, it is nigh impossible to coordinate millions of people to produce designs that are coherent with the rest of the site.
Imagine a city where councils allow full freedom of styling and architecture, and home owners are given the tools to DIY-design their houses. The place won’t look good. It won’t even be eclectic or organic. It would be a mess. Black bulky concrete cubes next to adobe hobbit-dens next to tin warehouses next to junkyards and caravans is what you’d get.
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Me myself I believe that if someone really wanted to do something like this then create a browser extension, or use one that's already created and add your own html and css styling, the browser & extension should then store the cache of the changes on browser then display it as needed, so far I've seen such actions being done by a lot of small time developers that want custom Discord or Flarum designs 😉
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Thank you I just saw this listed in the Latest Modules section of my Studio, thank you for creating it and it does what Dolphin did pretty much and I would recommend this to anyone. Now this pretty much brings back what I like about Dolphin. So thank you again. This is what I was looking for. I am going to check it out now.