More flexible name structures in the panel

Spurred by this article, which links to the W3C’s page on personal names around the world, I’d like to open up a discussion about how we deal with User data in the panel.

The current setup gives us a First Name and a Last Name field by default. With Kirby 2.2 we now have the ability to add our own user fields, which is great, but the First Name / Last Name structure is not appropriate in a lot of cases, and it can’t be modified.

I know this may seem like a small detail, but if I know one thing about Kirby it’s that we like to sweat the details :smile:

A few examples from the W3C page:

Icelanders prefer to be called by their given name (Björk), or by their full name (Björk Guðmundsdóttir). Björk wouldn’t normally expect to be called Ms. Guðmundsdóttir. Telephone directories in Iceland are sorted by given name.

In the Malay name Isa bin Osman the word ‘bin’ means ‘son of’ (‘binti’ is used for women). If you refer to this person you might say Mr. Isa, or if you know him personally, Encik Isa (Encik is a Malay word rather like Mr.).

Spanish-speaking people will commonly have two family names. For example, María-Jose Carreño Quiñones may be the daughter of Antonio Carreño Rodríguez and María Quiñones Marqués. You would refer to her as Señorita Carreño, not Señorita Quiñones.

Should the next version of Kirby transition to a single free-form Name field? I realise this may have backwards-compatibility implications, but it seems like the right thing to do.

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Maybe it would be a good idea not to have any name fields at all but leave it to the developers to decide, which fields they need for their purposes. For the panel, it should be enough just to have the username, email, password, role and language.

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I agree. Issue submitted: https://github.com/getkirby/panel/issues/682

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