Do we really need separate fields for first and last names?
This post shows how name components, which one is sorted on, and which one is normally used, vary around the world. The Chinese section is a bit weak as it doesn’t mention common titles such as 老毛 and 小毛, and the common use of nicknames, often by doubling given name characters like 东东, but the author gets his point across. Maybe it’s time to just use a full name field, and perhaps a field for an alias or preferred shorter name?
July 20th, 2007 at 10:17 am
But then we will probably also need a sort name field, like Musicbrainz uses to convert “The Books” to “Books, The”. So fullname, sortname, and display_name.
Or maybe just fullname with family name first and then displayname? Nah, the Americans won’t like it.
July 20th, 2007 at 10:55 am
Uh oh, it ate my underscores. Imagine that every time the italics go on or off there’s an underscore.
July 21st, 2007 at 12:54 pm
Yeah, sorting does require a consistent way of dealing with it. More and more, though, people are searching instead of browsing, but even then you’ll need a way to order the search results, I guess. I was very surprised to hear that in Iceland they order people by first name in their telephone directory.
July 28th, 2007 at 2:48 pm
firstname = models.CharField((’first name’), maxlength=30, blank=True)
lastname = models.CharField((’last name’), maxlength=30, blank=True)
nickname = models.CharField(_(’nick’), maxlength=30, blank=True)
def getfullname(self):
“Returns the firstname plus the lastname, with a space in between.”
fullname = ‘%s %s’ % (self.firstname, self.lastname)
return fullname.strip()
just like the code from django.contrib.auth, haha
June 9th, 2008 at 9:53 am
think feedjack deals with feed names the way exactly you said.
and maybe it has something to do with denormalization ?