Thoughts on Activism Network 4.0 - A Network of Anything

Currently I'm doing some work to see if it is realistic to try and make the next major version of Activism Network allow for user customization of what is in the network. Here comes the "Network of Anything"! The goal is to increase the number of people using the software (and thus create a community of developers by opening it up to non-activist networks), and to make it easier for activists to create their own networks.

Thus instead of just being useful for activist networks, the software could be used for any type of network. There would be a user-interface that lets you choose 1) What is in your network and 2) What properties those things have. You could design your own type of network, without understanding how my software is structured and without knowing PHP or MySQL.

Currently you can modify the software to be a "Network of Anything", however this requires knowing how the software is structured and for people other than myself this is difficult.

Any implementation of this will still be relatively complex, as you will need to specify whether each field is a number, string, or other type. You will need to define how everything is displayed (possibly choosing from 20-40 display methods). In general, there will be a lot of customization to do to create a new network. However, the advantage is that it will all be in one place, instead of the current system which requires scavenging through the 40+ program files to see where changes are required.

The user will make their customizations, and then this will trigger the writing of PHP files (for things like classes - eg. I'll be using PHP to write PHP files) and the MySQL dump file.

This idea could easily take months. Perhaps a year. So I'm not sure whether I should give it a try. A major side benefit is that in doing this, I'm refactoring the code and reducing the number of "special cases". So I'm trying to treat all things as similarly as possible (eg people, group, issue, campaign, event, etc) using the same rules.