jfbc 5.1.1 google username prefix

Alex,
Glad you're liking the new release so far. We're very excited about it, obviously, and poured a huge effort into re-structuring just about every line of code to make adding new providers (like Twitter) much simpler in the future. It was a big undertaking, but already paying off very well with ease of code and less support than normal after such a big release.

With that said, there are definitely some bugs. I haven't heard of the issue you mention and am not sure why that would be happening. Can you let me know if the "Name" field in the Joomla User Manager is being properly filled out? That will narrow things down greatly. Basically, the Open ID method (which isn't even really what it is.. it's like a beat-up old authentication method that they still support, but really is just basic authentication.. but I digress) returns a very limited profile. There is a 'name', 'family_name', and 'given_name' field. For the first.last or firlas, we use the given and family name fields. It's possible those don't exist for some users.

If the Name field does work, then it means that the 'name' field (likely) always works, but the family and given may not. That would be easy to check if those are empty and fall back to 'name' in that case.. just need to know more details since we hadn't seen that in our tests. I'm assuming the Name field has to work since the g_1234 setting works, but just want to check.

As always, thanks for the feedback and if you have any suggestions or comments, let us know.

Thanks,
Alex

Oh yeah.. thanks for the German. I don't manage the translations stuff, so I don't monitor that. However, we had a discussion the other day about some translations that weren't up-to-date and there was a quick comment about "Except German, that's always ready to go". I didn't think anything of it at the time.. but it made me smile when reading your post

Thanks again! We really do appreciate it.

On an unrelated note, do you/have you used Xing? I know it's a big German social network, but not much else. We get requests to support it periodically, and wanted to know if you had any thoughts on it's value or your interest. Like I mentioned, we've redesigned JFBConnect to have a much easier process to support new social networks. After Twitter and LinkedIn, that's high on our list to investigate... no guarantees though. Your feedback would be very, very appreciated.

Thanks,
Alex

Alex,
I was a bit confusing on what I was asking for above.. can you tell me, for the users on your site with a g_1234 prefix, is their "Name" field in Joomla correct? Mainly, was that field able to be imported from Google correctly? You don't need to revert to the first.last prefix or anything, just let me know if that 'Name' field seems to be importing correctly as that will help us understand how to best fix the other case.

Regarding Xing, thanks for the feedback. It's what we were looking for. *If* we were to roll out Xing integration, it would likely be an add-on of sorts to JFBConnect, and not directly integrated into it. That way, the users that want it can use it, but the user's that don't would be confused by it. It's still early stages for the ability to have add-ons like that, but it's an investigation point for us. Your feedback helps us determine whether that idea is worth pursuing or not.

Thanks again, and good luck,
Alex

Alex,
That helps immensely and was exactly what I needed to know. We'll implement a 'fallback' to check if the first and last name aren't available from Google and, if not, use some variation of the email address as the user's name. Likely, we'd use the portion before the @ symbol as users tend to go up in arms if their email address is displayed on the front-end. It's not ideal as their Joomla name could be something funky because email address are, many times, funky.. but it should work.

This should be easy to implement. If you want the code, let me know, and I can make sure I post it back here before release. Otherwise, it will go in the 5.1.2 release, likely out around mid-September.

Thanks again!
Alex