Pattern moderation: Users appear as "unknown" in logs and internal notes

[coreymckrill]

This is happening because the users aren't actually members of the Pattern Directory site, they are just in the global user table.

The Internal Notes plugin uses WP's rest api embedding feature to pull author data into the response that contains the note data, but again, that doesn't work when the "author" is not a member of the site. One solution to this might be to create a new rest endpoint (that maybe lives in wporg-mu-plugins?) for retrieving global user info. That could definitely have privacy implications, so it'd would probably require some capability checks before responding with any data.

@ryelle has this issue with the global user table come up anywhere else in the Pattern Directory? How is it being addressed there?

[ryelle]

I've run into that a few times, here and on WordCamp too, usually I end up adding a field to the API to return it, since PHP has no trouble getting that user data. For example, the author_meta field on Patterns, so that we can display the author name & avatar on pattern pages.

pattern-directory/public_html/wp-content/plugins/pattern-directory/includes/pattern-post-type.php

Lines 344 to 371 in 349d206

	register_rest_field(
	POST_TYPE,
	'author_meta',
	array(
	'get_callback' => function( $post ) {
	return array(
	'name' => esc_html( get_the_author_meta( 'display_name' ) ),
	'url' => esc_url( home_url( '/author/' . get_the_author_meta( 'user_nicename' ) ) ),
	'avatar' => get_avatar_url( $post['author'], array( 'size' => 64 ) ),
	);
	},
	'schema' => array(
	'type' => 'object',
	'properties' => array(
	'name' => array(
	'type' => 'string',
	),
	'url' => array(
	'type' => 'string',
	),
	'avatar' => array(
	'type' => 'string',
	),
	),
	),
	)
	);

I think it would be great if we had a new endpoint to get this info. There's a related core ticket, but it has almost no activity in the last 5 years…

That could definitely have privacy implications, so it'd would probably require some capability checks before responding with any data.

Would it be that different from how the regular users endpoint works? I know that's been contentious in the past, so I think you're right that we should be careful, but just basic user info should be fine to be public. (I'm also thinking that in the case of the above use case, a site visitor wouldn't necessarily be logged in to get the pattern author data).

[ryelle]

This was fixed with WordPress/wporg-mu-plugins#184 & WordPress/wporg-mu-plugins#192.