Customizing and/or disabling activity 2.1

DirtyDog

After playing around with 2.1 for a couple months I've decided that the activity feature could use some changes and the ability to turn it off completely for site owners that don't want it. How difficult would it be to create a plugin that allows it to be turned off? And for the more difficult part - what about a plugin that allows the admin to pick and choose what is stored and displayed in activity (ie turn off that a user has updated his profile pic). Was hoping to get a developers perspective on whether this was possible.

businessdad

As far as I know, the Activity logic doesn't implement events that could allow to intercept the writing and filter out unwanted entries. Additionally, the method that saves the data, ActivityModel->Add(), is called directly everywhere an Action is saved to the database.

This approach doesn't provide an easy way to inject some logic between the call to ActivityModel and the actual writing of the data, therefore I reckon that it could take some hacking to get it done.

I can't swear that the above is 100% correct, I didn't spend a lot of time analysing the framework. It would be nice to get the opinion of other developers who know more of Vanilla's inner logic.