Creating & Editing User Profiles in Seblod
With Seblod, it is easy to expand the default fields available for user profiles, and to let your users to manage their profile information. This tutorial offers the basic steps involved in getting this set up in your site.
Introduction
In Seblod, user profiles are stored just like articles. They consist of fields just like any other Seblod content types. You can view all your registered users in the normal Joomla Article Manager. And you can open user profiles just like articles to edit them. This gives you a lot of creativity and flexibility in setting up community-type sites.
Adding New User Fields and Editing Existing Fields
These instructions show you how to quickly expand your user registration forms and handle them.
Seblod has a "User" content type set up by default. You can use that to build your extra fields.
Follow these steps:
- Go to the Seblod Form & Content Type Manager
- Open the User content type. You will see the current fields added by default.
- Add any extra fields you need (for example, you could add text boxes for "phone" and "phone2")
- Add any rules (for example, do you want the field to be required)?
- Save the content type
- Apply the fields to all required views (Admin, Site, Intro, Content)
In my example above, I also added a "name" to each of the fields as follows:
- "phone" field received the name "Landline"
- "phone2" field received the name "Mobile"
For your fields to be saved and accessed as user profile fields, they must be stored as "User" in the "Storage Format / Location Area" of the Seblod control panel, along with the name of the field.
For example, my "phone" field would be stored as follows:
Standard / User / phone
For example, my "phone" field would be stored as follows:
Standard / User / phone
Now, the new fields are part of all user profiles. Every time people register at your site, they will see the new fields.
Editing User Profile Fields
To edit the fields, just go back into Seblod and re-open the "User" content type. From there, you can add, remove, or re-order your fields just like you would any other content type. The new configuration will show up in the user registration form. Be sure to do the edits from all four views.
What About Current Users?
What happens to people who are already registered if you change the user profile form fields? One of the great things about using regular articles for user forms is that new user fields are added naturally to existing profiles. The new fields will be empty until the users open their profiles and enter the new data. But you can easily send out a notification of some kind to let all your users know that the profile form has changed, and alert them to add the new information.
Schenker
December 13, 2011
3530
January 28, 2012
