Advanced User Profiles in Drupal

Don't let the title fool you!
Drupal profiles can be simple and intuitive for both users and developers. This session will cover steps for setting up attractive (and functional) user profiles in Drupal. We'll start with a quick overview of the Content Profile module and then discuss theming strategies to make the profiles attractive and easy. Finally we'll take a look some of the profile changes coming up in Drupal 7.

Day:
Sunday, 6/27
Time Slot:
3:30pm - 4:30pm
Room:
NC #1130 Growing Venture Solutions
Skill Level:
Beginner
Intermediate
Track:
Development
Slides:

Better session title? I

Better session title?

I thought this was going to be about "Installation Profiles" aka "Distribution Profiles" - maybe you coulud call this "Advanced User Profiles in Drupal" to make it more clear that this is about User Profiles.

Looks like an awesome session.

Good call. Thanks.

Good call. Thanks.

Looks like the title got

Looks like the title got changed.

I've had to do some advanced user profiles in the past and my only gripe with using content profiles (w/ contemplates or custom templates) is the issue of wanting a node type to be per user singleton. Without this, it seems it's possible for a user to accidentally create multiple nodes-as-profiles and muck things up quite a bit. So my solution was to give up and put in some role detection code in a switch statement in the theme layer with non-required profile fields and just mongrel out this lose-lose compromise solution.

Clearly, there has to be a better way than what I've thought. I've found user profiles to be the most frustrating thing in the world and it feels not well-thought-out in drupal 6. Really hoping drupal 7 is going to move in a better direction with it!