How to set up designer form fields - is an overall summary of strategy possible?

Specific issue:
What is the result if display option for a profile field is set to “All Users, including logged out” ? When I am logged out of my network, I cannot see a profile field that is 'displayed' in this way - so what is the meaning of the option when we are setting up a designer form field?

General issue:
After one year, I am still struggling with how to set up fields in the designer forms for accounts and profiles, and how the fields in each area relate to each other, to account holders, to administrators, logged-in network members, and non-logged in site visitors.

With all of this, I am trying to understand what the optimal combination of settings might be, that I can make as a site administrator.

Specific aspects of the problem have been addressed from many different angles in the various support forum threads, but I have not seen any overarching explanation or summary of how best to set up the designer forms, for one or more common scenarios of JR usage.

I presume this is because so many different variables are involved. I would also love to see basic example sites (model sites) that somehow illustrate what can be done by setting up the designer fields in different ways.

I have attempted to make a summary myself.

Please see the attached table that tries to put everything together on one page. Comments inside the table have labels to assist discussion of different parts of the table.


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PJ Matthews, Kyoto
Migrated from Ning 2.0. Now at Jamroom 6 beta and using Jamroom Hosting for The Research Cooperative (researchcooperative.org)
updated by @researchcooperative: 03/25/17 03:51:49AM

To be honest, Form Designer is designed to allow you to add fields that are important to your users. This means you'll need to decide which fields you want to require, and which ones you do not.

For the most part I would recommend NOT using Form Designer until you know you need it. At that point you'll have a better idea of the data you want to get with a custom field.

Also - while in form designer make sure and click on the Question Mark help button to the right of each field - detailed help is available within.


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Brian Johnson
Founder and Lead Developer - Jamroom
https://www.jamroom.net

For me, the form designer is central to the social purpose of the network, because it is (a) where site members can tell other site members about themselves in a structured way, by setting up a personal and public profile, and (b) new visitors who are not yet members can see what kind of people have joined the network.

I am trying to balance what I consider to be essential (required) information for a public profile, with giving members freedom to say more or less about themselves using the optional fields.

Thanks


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PJ Matthews, Kyoto
Migrated from Ning 2.0. Now at Jamroom 6 beta and using Jamroom Hosting for The Research Cooperative (researchcooperative.org)
updated by @researchcooperative: 12/22/16 06:38:20PM

Thanks... yes, this does explain what I was suggesting.


In my case, my Regular Users quota makes users "Power Users" who can make more than one profile. This power may be useful for members who can offer more than one kind of service, as editors and translators, for example, or as researchers and editors.

This leads to a further issue that I have been trying to get to grips with, namely how to provide different profile fields for different quotas?

If users can sign up for different quotas, and be (for example) "Power users" within different quotas, then a field that is intended for Quota A profiles created by Quota A power users may be seen by Quota B power users who signed up for Quota B and do not need the Quota A field in their profiles.

Perhaps the general rule here is to make the access to quotas and to profile fields as precise as possible.

We must be careful about unintended overlap in access to to a Profile field when we let the field be seen by the different user categories in the "Display Groups".

Unintended overlap in who sees which profile fields when creating and editing profiles becomes more likely if a single user can create profiles in more than one quota, and is thus a power user in more than one quota.


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PJ Matthews, Kyoto
Migrated from Ning 2.0. Now at Jamroom 6 beta and using Jamroom Hosting for The Research Cooperative (researchcooperative.org)
updated by @researchcooperative: 12/22/16 08:57:48PM