Include subject link in river summaries

[ewinslow]

As of 1.8, our standard river entry summaries do not include the subject. For example the entire summary is "created a page" instead of "Evan created a page". I realize that the subject is included *above* the summary and forms a full sentence in context, but I think we should include the subject with the summary for a few reasons:

1. Standards -- per ​http://activitystrea.ms syndicated content needs to be able include a full summary that consumers can display without providing context and have it make sense. Right now, this is not the case, since the subject is not included in the summary.
2. I18n/RTL -- the subject could be manually prepended to the summary, but I imagine some translations would not want to include the subject right at the front. As an ad hoc example, suppose I wanted to create a "yoda" translation -- the summary would likely need to read something like "posted a comment, Evan did". Best I could do now is "posted a comment, they did".
3. Familiarity -- Every social site I've seen puts the subject's name/link inline with the summary. The only exceptions are when the summary is implied by the content and therefore omitted entirely. For example, twitter does not say "Evan tweeted" and then include my tweet, it just says "Evan" and includes the tweet. Facebook statuses work similarly.
4. Flexibility -- if a site wants to ignore the subject link that is passed to it, it could do so simply by changing the language string, but it's currently not possible to include the subject in the summary unless one does a lot of view AND language string overriding. Translation: it's a big hassle to make a change that many would otherwise love to make.

[cash]

I wrote the new river implementation. I attempted to reduce duplicate code by pulling the subject and date out into a view that is reused for every river item. The decision to have a subject/date line was inspired by some other social sites that I had seen. I thought it was a lot easier to scan that way. The two decisions are mostly independent.

• Standards - current implementation does not prevent the RSS feed or JSON output from including the subject in the summary.
• RTL - should be no issue with RTL. It is handled through the theme.
• i18n - yes, yoda translations are not supported. Hawaiian is another that won't work. Big failing with this approach.
• Flexibility - Some things are easier and others are harder. It is easier with the current implementation to ignore the subject link. Override one view and you're done rather than overriding every single river view. It is very hard to move the subject into the middle of the sentence (override main river view, every river view, and the language strings).

I have no objections to you rewriting this. Perhaps there is a way to use a summary view so that if someone wanted to do an alternate layout of the summary, they are not forced to override every river view?

[ewinslow]

Replying to cash:

I wrote the new river implementation. I attempted to reduce duplicate code by pulling the subject and date out into a view that is reused for every river item. The decision to have a subject/date line was inspired by some other social sites that I had seen. I thought it was a lot easier to scan that way. The two decisions are mostly independent.

OK, makes sense. Thanks for the explanation. What sites were these? I'd love to take a look and get a wider array of potential layouts to consider.

I have no objections to you rewriting this. Perhaps there is a way to use a summary view so that if someone wanted to do an alternate layout of the summary, they are not forced to override every river view?

That is a good thought -- the current issue with my method is definitely that the summary must be manually constructed for each view, including adding classes like elgg-river-subject/target/object to the appropriate links, which I've already said is an indication a template is needed. I'll look into how this might be done.

[cash]

There are a whole host of intranet-oriented social software out there. I'll see if I can pull together some links on those.

[Cash Costello]

Merge pull request #35 - Fixes #3404, #3490

Changeset: 9edc8c6004d1236a21e03fb1c820a6e749f1ee3b