One thing I did not like about the old Joomla 1.5 and 1.0 was that need to use 3rd party tools to add extra fields to Joomla’s user registration process. The 3rd party tools were often heavyweights like Community Builder, which were complete overkill for what I was doing, e.g. adding a country or city or even just requiring the user to accept terms and conditions.
OK, so it wasn’t too hard to install and configure these extensions, but one thing I have always been careful about was to keep 3rd party extensions to an absolute minimum; the more extensions you have the more careful one needs to be in relation to security patching and updates, and of course hoping that nothing breaks when you do upgrade! + the more 3rd party extensions one has, the more potential routes for attacks on one’s websites.
Joomla 1.6+ fixes this with the inclusion of a core plugin to handle this functionality; the User Profile Plugin. The plugin is disabled by default. More info on this plugin in the official docs here: Creating a profile plugin – Joomla! Documentation
“It allows the addition of supplemental fields in the registration and profile forms of the com_user front end and in the user create/edit form in the back end.”
This is what we were waiting for. Seems that it is possible to add things like street address, zip, postal code, phone number and such. From the docs:
The profile plugin makes it possible to add extra fields to the user profile form in 4 places:
- The registration form
- The frontend profile editing view
- The backend profile editing view (My Profile)
- The backend user manager user edit view.
Each of these are controlled independently. They can all be the same or specific fields can be available in each form. Similarly, fields can be set as required independently for each form or all can be the same.
Any field type from the form library can be used.
Optionally the profile for a linked user can be displayed in linked content record.
Multiple profile plugins may be used.