Answered User Profile Extended Fields

I need to add several fields to the user profile page of a specific user-group. The tutorials I've been able to find so far haven't been much help in explaining how to use the Extended Fields page. Can someone point me towards a good reference?

Interesting, Bob. A couple questions:

1. Can I extend just the modUser and not the modResource, or are both required?
2. Once I create the new fields can I delete the two Resources or are they still required?

Yes, you can extend only one of the two, or both.

You should be able to delete the resources, but you can't uninstall ClassExtender.

Great. Thanks, Bob.

I hope v3.0 improves upon the tedious and vague process of using the native User Profile Extended Fields. The info I found kinda made my eyes glaze over.

I hope v3.0 improves upon the tedious and vague process of using the native User Profile Extended Fields.

I agree completely, although it's not all that complicated. It's just horrible for searching and sorting.

You can think of the extended field as a PHP associative array. It's stored as a JSON string in the DB (that's why it's so useless for searching and sorting), but it's automatically converted to an associative array when you get it with $profile->get(), and automatically converted to a JSON string when you call $profile->set().

Another failing is that when you add a new extended field for a user in the Manager, it doesn't add that field for other users. You have to go through the process for each user (or use a utility snippet to update all of them).

I agree completely, although it's not all that complicated. It's just horrible for searching and sorting.

Then let me ask you this: If all I need to do with these extra User profile fields is auto-populate a few TVs on the front-end, is there really any performance hit in using the native Extended Fields? That seems pretty basic.

If you never need to search for users (or sort them) by the content of the extended fields, or by the content of the TVs, there's not much of a hit.

Using ClassExtender would likely replace the TVs as well as the extended fields.