User Panels shoots pretty high: it aims to provide a consistent, easy platform for the handling of user-centric information display. It's not about new storage mechanisms or anything like that - just about marshaling all that user content together in a sane, easy-to-use way. I'm hoping that this blog post can be a semi-official shout-out to the drupal community - an RFC, I guess.

user_panels comes out of a basic observation about Drupal: virtually every Drupal site has a different conceptualization of who users are, what their role is within the site, how they should be interacting with one another, etc. This observation helps explain why it's been so difficult to settle the question of how 'users' ought to be handled - most folks, myself absolutely included, are coming from the perspective of a particular use case. Even with deliberate effort, it's been pretty tough to get into a genericized head-space with respect to users. There are, I think, a couple reasons for this.

I've gotten a lot of good feedback about our KDI proposal since I posted it up a couple weeks ago, although a fair bit has been through one-on-one conversations I've had with folks. Generally, the feedback has been great (in both the complimentary and constructive criticism senses), although the venue has been a little unfortunate - I'd rather it be in comments on the issue itself, because we could use the momentum. But as I've been reading the thoughts of those who have been intrepid enough to comment, I realized that I'd managed to write a very long proposal without actually providing any specific examples. In particular, it was the comments by and subsequent discussions with moshe and eaton that led me to this conclusion.