Since I’ve been playing around with user management a lot lately, I thought I’d share a simple technique I picked up. This technique will allow you to easily add new user profile fields that your blog’s users can use to input more information about themselves.
Management of these fields will be coming in a later version of my user management plugin, but some of you may want to do this now.
In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to add an input box for a Twitter username and how to display it on your site, which will look a little something like this:
My profile and Twitter link
If you want to see a live example, check out one of my latests posts on Pop Critics.
Adding custom user fields
Open your theme’s functions.php file and drop this PHP code in:
add_action( 'show_user_profile', 'my_show_extra_profile_fields' );
add_action( 'edit_user_profile', 'my_show_extra_profile_fields' );
function my_show_extra_profile_fields( $user ) { ?>
<h3>Extra profile information</h3>
<table class="form-table">
<tr>
<th><label for="twitter">Twitter</label></th>
<td>
<input type="text" name="twitter" id="twitter" value="<?php echo esc_attr( get_the_author_meta( 'twitter', $user->ID ) ); ?>" class="regular-text" /><br />
<span class="description">Please enter your Twitter username.</span>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<?php }This will create a new area in the user edit screen that looks like this:
Additional profile fields
The custom part of the code is this bit:
<tr>
<th><label for="twitter">Twitter</label></th>
<td>
<input type="text" name="twitter" id="twitter" value="<?php echo esc_attr( get_the_author_meta( 'twitter', $user->ID ) ); ?>" class="regular-text" /><br />
<span class="description">Please enter your Twitter username.</span>
</td>
</tr>Note that if you want to add more fields, copy that and change twitter to something unique for each additional field. Just make sure you change each instance of twitter.
Saving the custom user fields
Just because we’re displaying these extra fields, doesn’t mean they’ll be saved when the user profile is updated. So, we need one more function to handle this. Drop this PHP code in your theme’s functions.php file.
add_action( 'personal_options_update', 'my_save_extra_profile_fields' );
add_action( 'edit_user_profile_update', 'my_save_extra_profile_fields' );
function my_save_extra_profile_fields( $user_id ) {
if ( !current_user_can( 'edit_user', $user_id ) )
return false;
/* Copy and paste this line for additional fields. Make sure to change 'twitter' to the field ID. */
update_usermeta( $user_id, 'twitter', $_POST['twitter'] );
}Now, your information will be saved.
Displaying custom user fields on the site
For getting these additional fields, WordPress has two nifty functions: the_author_meta() and get_the_author_meta(). The former displays the meta information, and the latter returns it for use in PHP. Each takes in two parameters:
the_author_meta( $meta_key, $user_id );You can use this to grab the information from any of the fields you’ve created. For example, the $meta_key for our Twitter field is twitter. We just need to call it up somewhere in our theme.
So, what we’re going to do is build an author box to add to the end of our single posts. Once again, we visit our theme’s functions.php file and drop some PHP code in:
function my_author_box() { ?>
<div class="author-profile vcard">
<?php echo get_avatar( get_the_author_meta( 'user_email' ), '96' ); ?>
<h4 class="author-name fn n">Article written by <?php the_author_posts_link(); ?></h4>
<p class="author-description author-bio">
<?php the_author_meta( 'description' ); ?>
</p>
<?php if ( get_the_author_meta( 'twitter' ) ) { ?>
<p class="twitter clear">
<a href="http://twitter.com/<?php the_author_meta( 'twitter' ); ?>" title="Follow <?php the_author_meta( 'display_name' ); ?> on Twitter">Follow <?php the_author_meta( 'display_name' ); ?> on Twitter</a>
</p>
<?php } // End check for twitter ?>
</div><?php
}Now, all you need to do call the function in your theme’s single.php file somewhere after the post has been displayed:
<?php my_author_box(); ?>If you’re using a child theme, your theme author can probably tell you a more appropriate action hook to add this function to so you don’t mess up your theme’s template files.
What other custom user field uses can you think of?
This is just another one of those powerful features of WordPress that I don’t see used much. I have several things in mind that I could use this technique for, but I’d like to hear what you’d do with it.
Surely we can do some cooler stuff than just displaying a link to Twitter?
Such a great tutorial that you give up there. I will definitely use it for my blog. The best part of the above tutorial is the way you integrate Twitter with user profile – by adding another part of the page when I key in my twitter user profile.
Besides Twitter’s profile link, it will definitely a good idea to put social bookmarking site especially Stumble Upon’s thumb up icon as I believe that by having that section, it can channel reader’s attention into the section.
Other than that – link to the latest post of the user maybe – especially for guest blogger as it can help to increase the incentive and motivation of the guest blogger.
Hi Justin. Is there a way to extend this to registration, so that the extra fields are required (maybe optionally required, but the input fields would be there) upon registering? Or alternately, maybe just direct people to their profile upon logging in, to complete their profile? I am thinking of using something like this for extended profiles, sort of a membership database, something I haven’t found a good version of yet (and I think you had similar trouble finding a while back?) It’s an area that’s lacking WordPress plugins.
I would use this for simple things like name, address, phone, interests, etc. All the things you’d need to know about a member of a club.
Justin,
I’m never disapointed with the quality of your work. This tutorial is simply excellent, I have learnt something soooo cool today
Thanks for sharing all this usefull info with us. Have a nice day!
Jean
Huzzer Magazine — Other social networks and bookmarking sites would definitely be something to consider. As for linking to guest bloggers’ latest posts, you can use the already available website info from their profiles to do something with.
Chris Hajer — Yeah, it’s entirely possible, but it’s a little more complex than what’s shown here.
You’d have to add your form elements to the
register_formhook. Then, I believe you’d have to overwrite thewp_new_user_notification()function (it’s pluggable) to save it because I don’t think there’s a hook when saving that’ll give you the user ID (you need that ID). I could be wrong about overwriting the function, but I don’t see anything right now that would make it easier.It’s definitely something I’ll be working into my plugin when I implement all of this.
Jean-Baptiste Jung — Thanks. I just like sharing back the things I learn with the community. If I had the time, I’d write a new tutorial every day.
Justin, I’m using Hybrid News and love that you have included a “Register” page template. I’ve used this tutorial to add a field for “Company Name” and it shows up on the Register page, but I’m not able to get the text entered into the field to populate and save in the custom field created in the user profile.
You offered a couple of tips earlier…
…But I’m not sure how to implement this. Any tips you…or anyone else have would be greatly appreciated.
Just a note the `user_register` hook works for processing custom fields added using the `register_form` hook.
You get access to both the new user id as well as the $_POST variables using that hook which is all you need to use `update_usermeta`
Just had to do this earlier today on a project I’m working on (using WP 2.9.2)
As for usage ideas I am slowly planning collaboration/hobby site, most probably on P2 theme (if I don’t find something more fitting).
I want to give users some degree of control over what parts (probably compartmentalized as widgets) of site they see, as well as option to filter RSS-embebed content with their keywords.
I hadn’t even started on actual code, but this technique seems like it will be of use. Thanks for explaining it!
This week we decided, for the project I’m involved in, that we want to use extra profile-info which the users can manage by themselves; and here is the answer to it.
Thanx, it’s really a timesaver and right on time
Nicely done – here’s another idea, instead of the code in functions.php, roll it all into one file, drop it in mu-plugins. Add some shortcode options then users across a WPMU install can whip up their own profile area wherever they like.
Great tutorial Justin, thanks a lot. I had the same thought as Chris above. I know there are a couple plugins out there that attempted the addition of form input fields on the registration form, but if this could ultimately be included in your user role plugin, it would simply be fantastic.
Hey Justin,
it’s become a lot easier to do this with a patch that I proposed and wrote a couple months back: http://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/11784. This is in trunk and will be included, as it looks right now, in 2.9, after that, user fields are filterable, and you could easily add the Twitter profile field just by doing this:
I’ll do a quick post detailing it all
i use that code but when trying to edit user profiles user.php have error promt
@Joost de Valk
Justin only shows a great alternative…
Justin code is Cool, your code … not …
I could think about custom user fields like “Hobbies”, “Location” or “Occupation” to make the users less faceless.
Post done, check it out: User Contact Fields in WordPress 2.9.
Rarst — The
update_usermeta()function could definitely be your friend when coding it. There’s loads of different things you can do with it.visaap — You’re welcome. I hope it comes in handy.
Andrea_R — Fortunately, the shortcodes are done. I’ll definitely be rolling this up into version 0.2 of my upcoming user/role plugin.
Adam W. Warner — It’s on my to-do list, so you can look forward to it in a future release.
Joost de Valk — Yes, I’ve seen the patch. Unfortunately, it does not make user fields filterable. It only makes a certain type of user field filterable — input boxes for contact information.
While the patch is wonderful, it doesn’t take into account textareas, checkboxes, radio boxes, select boxes, or any other type of form element I want to add other than a text input box under the “Contact Info” section.
Andreas Graf — Those are definitely some good ideas for extending the user fields.
I have a feeling your to-do list looks a lot like this.
This is wonderful and so easy to follow, thanks so much for sharing!
I’m trying to incorporate it into the author archives using this method: http://codex.wordpress.org/Author_Templates
Is there a way to code the twitter link so that it’ll work outside of the loop?
Adam W. Warner — I’ve been looking all over for that. Where’d you find it?
Amanda — Just use the
the_author_meta()shown above in the post. You’ll need to add in the second parameter (user’s ID).Justin this look cool and familiar (http://blog.ftwr.co.uk/archives/2009/07/19/adding-extra-user-meta-fields/)
With regard to the improvements in 2.9 – what use-case do you have for anything other than a text box for a contact info attribute of a user?
(BTW – You don’t need the current_user_can() check when processing the new form fields as the capability has already been checked by the main form processing code but it is always better to be safe than sorry)
i’m doing a site whereby each member has their own post… I’d like to see this profile page used as a means to set up their post…. maybe even incorporate a basic tinymce editor?
Another very informative post Justin. I keep coming back to your site to learn more. Keep up the good work.
I learn so much from you Justin!
Thanks for this.
(may I take this opportunity to tell you how nice it would be to have a search option on your site?)
I’m using something similar to this to add links to iTunes and CDbaby for the discography pages on a site I’m working on (http://burntsugarindex.com/making-love-to-the-dark-ages/) but I think your method is a bit more elegant.
I’m going to have to revisit that…
westi — Man, I wish I would’ve seen that before I had to figure this out all on my own. It would’ve been helpful.
As for use cases, I’d rather show you an example than describe it.
CG — I don’t think the user profile page is the best place to be posting from. I’d recommend just using the normal post editor.
amy gail — Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t see what the iTunes and CDBaby things have to do with user profiles.
You’re right – Not so much user profiles
- I’m thinking along the line of the way you’ve inserted the twitter user name via custom fields and hooked them into the author meta.
In my case – each CD has it’s own link to iTunes and CDbaby- I’m using custom fields (in custom single post templates) for that now and it works. Your post has me thinking that I can do it a bit more elegantly.
That’s all
I’m jealous- what I wouldn’t give to be able to create this kind of code myself! For now, I’ll just have to rely on you.
Hey Justin… I would love to see this code along with your user management code to be used for a comprehensive dating site for wordpress…. but integrated with a paypal/different costs for different features thingy.
hi Justin.. how would I use this with a text area, checkboxes, drop down list etc…
As to extra fields, it would be nice to show either the most recent posts by the user, ‘title-date’ format, or even better allow the author to set permanent links to their favorite posts or both.
This is one area of wordpress that has really been overlooked. So many volunteer organizations use wordpress and could use a membership directory.
It should be easy to add extra users fields as needed (address, phone, etc).
The user should have an option button to opt in or out of appearing in the directory.
The directory would be protected and not viewable unless you were log in.
The admin would have a slightly different view of directory so everyone is included.
Even better would be option buttons next to each field to decide which info is ok to display.
A drag and drop interface to customize where info goes on your directory page.
This would make wordpress more useful to churches, neighborhood associations, hobby groups etc.
I’m going to look into doing that – adding custom fields helps your audience tell you more about themselves, and that creates a nice report between you, which, needless to say, is highly beneficial for your blog and online business.
Great tutorial.. Thanks Justin..
Great TUT! Can you think of a way to add an mp3 upload field that will allow the visitor to listen to an mp3 sample of someone’s music, such as a band?
Justin, really a outstanding Tut. Thank you fort sharing this.
Like Vince I would like to know if there is a way to upload. In my case an .jpg or .gif file.
Any ideas on that.?
thats a cool tutorial, thank you very much!
i’m running a website for a cycling club, and i wanted a (protected) page to list all the members full names and contact info like mail adress, home and work phone nr etc.
Also, each member should be able to modify his own (but only his) data.
Think your tutorial gave me exactly the tools needed for this..
great idea.
short and powerful.
Thks
Hya, ty for the code/tutorial. You are mentioning an plugin, what will this plugin do exactly?
Will it add custom fields to User Profile, and automaticly add them to the register process? Maybe also an customized register ‘page’?
If so I would gladly beta test anything for you. Else I have to write them myself, or together even.
I’ve been working on building up a new theme profile page that conglomerates all of the writer’s social media profiles into one spot, and I think this will work perfectly! Thanks for the tutorial.
Great work and easy to follow instructions. Keep up the excellent work
Hi Justin… you still alive these days?
Just wondering…
1. Are you planning to release this nifty little code as a plugin?
Thanks for good article. I appreciate your thoughts and information presented at this time.
This is so awesome .. thanks! It would be cool to be able to upload various images as well associated with authors .. that could be your next tutorial .. great work!
You are a bloody champion!!!!
I will use it Justin, thanks for this tips
Another very informative post Justin. I keep coming back to your site to learn more. Keep up the good work.
This is a Life!
is there a way to add the First Name and Last Name fields onto the regitration page?
Awesome tutorial, thanks!
I’ve used it to create a load of biography fields for a band site, so ‘Instrument’, ‘Musical History’ and ‘Influences’ all feature in there. So cool
Great tutorial!!! I just wonder how you get a textarea instead of regular text field?
Justin– as always, great tutorial.
I’d love to take some of these custom fields and show them in the comments form next to “Website” for instance. Is this possible with these custom fields?
Steve
This is a great tutorial.
I’m doing something similar to what you’ve shown, but have run into one problem – the custom meta data I enter on the profile form gets saved (it displays in my custom author template fine), but once submitted the custom fields are blank on the profile form unless I’m looking at it from within the admin side.
This is the basic formatting for all the text fields:
Is there something obvious that I’m doing wrong?
Let me try that again:
For some reason I can’t get this to work.
My profile page doesn’t contain the twitter section & going to a post having put the php my_author_box in single.php brings up this error:
Fatal error: Call to undefined function my_author_box() in /home/mobileus/public_html/blog/wp-content/themes/inove/single.php on line 58
(line 58 is where the php my_author_box thing is.)
Anyone help by any chance? (REALLY WANT THIS LOL!)
Hi! Thanks for your guide it’s really usefull.
But I need some more suggestion, what I need to do if I want to upload a pdf file also?
Something like a resume attached to the profile.
Thank you so much.
I’m interested in this too-how do you make a file upload field? This puts the field on the profile page, but I’m not sure where the resume is going or how to display a link to it on author.php page:
Hello !This is nice and wonderful, all the tips so easy to follow, thanks so much for sharing! nice post carry on ….
Justin this is awesome. You just saved me tons of time.
Has anyone attempted to replicate this with friending/supporting on Facebook?
I successfully implemented this with Twitter.
Also…any way to add graphics to spruce it up a little bit?
Thanks much.
How can I do the same with checkboxes, textareas etc?? I greatly appreciate any advice anyone can offer with this. Thanks.
Hi Justin,
thank you for the tutorial. I am looking around on how to add some custom user profile field and then use it in a condition. Let’s say to give an access to a page only to some users.
I guess I can use get_the_author_meta for the condition but how can I add the and edit the field by admin?
I cannot find anything on that.
Thank you,
Radek
Hi again. I was not clear the first time. I want only users with admin role to be able to edit the extra profile field and if it is not already there create one. Then I can use get_the_author_meta in a condition. Any idea how to do that? Thank you. R
Is it possible to add this new fields during the registration process?
Great work mate, you are the php man!
Fantastic tutorial Justin! Thanks a lot!
Excellent code. Thanks to this article, I’ve actually taken it several steps further and totally redesigned the user profile form: putting the fields I want, in the order I want them.
So for my own sanity, I created a separate custom-profile.php file and simply ‘included’ it in the theme’s function.php file.
Then I hid ALL the default WP user profile areas by adding inline CSS to this custom php file:
#profile-page h3 {display: none;}
#profile-page .form-table {display: none;}
Then I rebuilt the WP user profile form within my custom-profile.php, reusing WP fields where I could (e.g. first name, last name, email, website etc) and creating new fields where I had to e.g. contact details: address 1, 2, 3, 4, zip, tel etc
I’ve even been able to keep the Password area in (but moved to a more logical section), so users can still change their password.
The whole user profile section now fits in one screen (no scrolling!).
This sounds fantastic, MrArrow. Can you give us a link?
hi MrArrow
that sounds fantastic. Could share your code with us?
Thanks for the tutorial Justin. I’m a designer not a developer, so a lot of times my options are limited. I appreciate your work on this subject and will be using the User Profile in sites to come. Keep up the good work!
Thanks,
Ralph
teamcolab.com
One more time, trying the code tag…I’m not spamming, I promise!
Thanks so much for posting this! I’m creating a corporate intranet and this paired with the (modified) WordPress Users plug-in will basically create a mini social network! Good stuff.
Some people had asked how to do this with other forms of input, and, praise God for it, I figured out how to do it with the select menu! Here’s the code (I don’t know if there’s a way to format it as code?):
Hope this helps someone!
This is fantastic and just what I’ve been looking for – we run a multi-author blog, and want to include a list of selected contributors in the sidebar; I’m thinking we can set a custom field for ‘include in sidebar’, and then code a widget to pull through just those contributors that have that flag set.
What about radio fields?
Would this be correct:
And would I have to add just one POST, or multiple?
One:
Or Two:
If I am on the right path..
I figured it out:
Hey Frosty,
I know this is an old post, but I just tried your code, and it adds the field fine, but it doesn’t seem to be “remembered” when I update the profile, did that work for you?
Please let me know, I haven’t found any resource on radio buttons or anything actually other than text fields…
Thanks!
Lili
So for the first bit of code, where exactly do you place it in the functions.php file?
Justin,
I’ve added the code above to write to the usermeta SQL table and got it to work in Thesis. But, I’d like to save the new field to the “users” database table instead of the usermeta table. I need to query the users database because I’m attempting to omit authors that have a new_field set to “guest” and would like to use the code below for this.
Any idea how would modify your code above to save to the users databse table instead of the usermeta? To me, the two tables look so different that I decided against just substituting “users” for “usermeta” above. I’m pretty new to coding in WP and appreciate any guidance.
I have been looking how to do this for a couple of days and I was stuck with the code.
This really works!!
But I had to change my function to work because I was putting the code outside The_loop. I wanted twitter and facebook to show in the header of every post by the respective author. This is what I did and it works fine.
Thank you so much for your input.
my blog is still in development, that’s why I don’t post the link just yet..
Really great post! Very helpful, I am working on a project where I am using wordpress as a company intranet CMS and this has come very handy. I was sent here from: http://www.dquinn.net/extending-user-profiles-wordpress/ where I had some other great ideas that I integrated into the mix.
My question for you is can this method be used to create a date of birth field? I want to be able to send birthday cards to each member based on a dob field in the user profile. I am not sure how I would implement this so anything you can contribute would be great.
Again thanks for the great insight.
I know this is an old post, but it’s still a fantastic resource.
What most people don’t know is that you can call these fields not only in a function, but also in an author template.
For example, instead of using the_author_meta, you use
twitter; ?>
Allows for some SWEET Mashable style profile pages with bio, social networks, etc on top, and recent posts by author on the bottom.
Justin,
First off THAN YOU THANK YOU for this post, works perfectly!!! Any ideas on when you’ll release v 0.2 of your members plugin? Would love to make my new fields available upon registering without having to hack any of the core WP files like you mentioned above.
Thanks again!!
Great information as always. Here is something I’m trying to figure out and I’m not quite sure if that method above works.
I want to generate automatically unique playerID for each new registered user. This id will be used at live events and later on in a custom app I’m building.
Later on I want to display this ID view author profile page
thoughts?
Really old comment thread I know, but just letting you know I just implemented this on a site I work for that needed a “school” field and it worked like a charm.
Your tutorials hit the sweet spot of (a) very cool functionality and (b) simple to implement. Thanks a lot.
I know this is an older thread but I need some help here…
When I do what is displayed above I can see the fields added to the profile page and when I put data in it goes to the tables, BUT it doesn’t get shown when you go back to the profile page. The fields show blank every time you go back to your profile.
Again, the data DOES go to the database but does NOT populate the field when I return to the profile page.
Any ideas? I took the code EXACTLY as in the article.
Dude seriously your work is awesome but since i am not a coder i didn’t get anything… please help where to add those codes in php after something or just anywhere?
Just a huge FYI, I don’t know exactly why but WordPress does not like form field names with dashes in them. ex) profile-twitter
I just spent a lot of time watching the saving process fail without any output or reasoning. Hope this helps someone from pulling all their hair out.
What I would do with custom profile fields? I would like to see something like Magic Fields but user centered instead of post centered, where I can add custom profile fields (all types), custom profile write panels for WP backend or even for frontend.
Then I could turn Wordpress in something like a medical records system, where the patients are registered users. I can display a unique page and capture the current logged in user to fill it with the subscriber medical data.
I can also make hidden alternate pages and change the author value to a specific user then fill the page with that user information (such as for doctors view).
Love your site. I know that this post was written last September, but the function update_usermeta is depreciated in version 3.0 and you should use update_user_meta.
Keep up the great website. Thank you.
Hm, is there posibility to save data from custom page in user menu in this way?
Thanks so much for this awesome article!
Thanks you too for your great article. Maybe you could help me out with a tip…
I totally stuck with a solution to sort/show last modified user profiles. In theory i thought it may be possible that a hidden field with the actual time and date will be stored in a seperate user_meta field. Everytime when a user hit the button “update profile” a function should store the time/date in a field like “last modified”. This would give the admin the possibilty to show/sort “last modified” user profiles.
Sorry for the request, but i searched a couple of days for a tip or solution without success.
Hi Justin congrats for the amazing tutorial!
I am trying to do the same but with checkboxes, just like CG and Tom Fischer.
In the user profile page I am trying to create a list of selectable checkboxes, because like hobbies the user can have more than one hobby choosable from my given examples.
The problem is when I am trying to show the saved information of the user the function
esc_attr( get_the_author_meta( 'hobbies', $user->ID ) );does not show nothing.The call at the function update_user_meta( $user_id, ‘hobbies’, $_POST['hobbies'] ); is present in to the save function.
Could you please be so kind to help me up with that?
Thanks!
Justin,
I made an approach to applying taxonomies to user profiles using your code here and modifying it a little bit. If you have the time, I would really appreciate if you could check my detailed post at WordPress.org and let me know what you think.
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/applying-custom-taxonomies-to-user-profiles?replies=1
How would you validate your custom fields with WordPress when updating user profile?
Is there a way to add errors to a global variable object WP_Error or hook to a special function.
Gold man, gold. Been looking how to do this for the last half hour (all the sites i found we’re ancient) so i’m loving you right now.
I created custom field called ‘location’ in user profile.
I want to display the new field ‘location’ along with user display name on their comments.
Example:
Bob Smith – New York City, NY
I have been searching for where I can concatenate my new field to the displayed user name.. but not sure.
I have searched get_author_name in author template and comments area in function.php but nothing is clearly the author name!
Any pointers? Thx
Does anyone know of a way of: bulk importing _users & _usermeta i.e. users, email, password + address1, address2, city, state etc. into a WordPress system, please.
So far I have been able to bulk add basic user information with dagondesign.com’s http://www.dagondesign.com/articles/import-users-plugin-for-wordpress/
But this plugin will only import the core WordPress user data (out of the box) a great solution that has gotten me far but what I need is to import _usermeta also.
Any help will be greatly appreciated!
Strange,
when i use your code (copy and paste) in my function php, the values are correctly saved in the database and are visible in the user interface but in the admin page the fields are blank. In other words when i came back in the admin page my field “City” is blank and i don’t see the value “London” in it.
Is there a problem with ID ) ); ?> in wordpress 3.0?
No problem if i use a non-custon field such as ID ) ); ?>
If someone has an idea…
Excellent! Just what I need!
Excellent! Still helping newbies over a year later.
One question is it possible to have these custom fields appear in the Admin -> “Add New User” page? (i.e. user-new.php)
This works great on the edit profile pages, using the “personal_options_update” & “edit_user_profile_update” hooks.
My problem is that I think I need to use a new hook “add_action(‘user_registration’,…” or similar to accomplish this. But of course that’s not working for me. Just curious if something like this is even possible.
Using WP 3.0.1
Thanks in advance,
Scott
Hey,
First off, very helpful tutorial, thanks for writing it. I know it’s a bit late on my part, but in case you still keep up with this page, I was wondering about the best way to update one of the custom user fields from a page other than the profile page. Basically, I’m using user profile fields to store values for an experience-based game and I just need to be able to update the old value with a new value (just contained in another input field on a page) in response to a button click. I know it’ll probably take AJAX to get this done (something about which I know very little) and searching for tutorials has led me to a frustrating dead end. Anyway, if you have any ideas or suggestions, I would be greatly appreciative.
Thanks very much,
Thomas
thanks for the info. i don’t really get it though. will this allow me to merge custom fields into blog posts, etc? say, i want to merge my name into a post with a custom field, how will this do that? thanks!
Brilliant!
This is exactly what I needed… My author page is looking slick now!
I’ve added twitter and facebook so far, and this is how I’ve displayed them.
This ensures that a field only shows up if the author has filled it in
I wonder, is there a way of simplifying the IF statement to check ALL custom fields and only spit out those which are filled in?
Hello,
This is a great tutorial, and It helps out a lot. I do have one question, how can I upload several photos into the profile. I want to allow users to upload their photos, and display the photos on their page.
Thank you,
Aaron
Could you use custom fields to capture star rating information? There are plugins out there, mostly paid. But a way to do it outside of the plugin might work, especially with new custom post types.
Howdy. Thanks for the excellent tutorial. I had no problem with the text field and moved on to checkboxes where I’m having some issues. I’m trying to populate a list of checkboxes derived from a custom post type. So I’ve got a custom post type called “Horses” and I want to have a list of those posts on the user’s page. I just can’t get over the hump. Here’s what I have….
This works fine with a hard coded values but I'm trying to create a unique value using the_ID(); but the_ID doesn't seem to work within the "is_array" (function???)
it prints out like this:
as you can see the “546=” is obviously not correct. It should be “checked=”checked”. I’m guessing that this is a php syntax issue caused by my lack of knowledge/understanding.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
thanks, Shag
that code didn’t print out properly. hopefully this will…
I ended up figuring this out thanks to some help from a dev buddy. I was using the_ID() which prints the value rather than get_the_ID() which returns the value (I think anyway). So if you use the code above and replace the bit that’s within the loop with this, it should work…
And for those curious folks, I used this on the front-end to display the array: (not sure if it’s the best way but it works for me)
Just wanted to let you know that your solution for displaying on the front end worked perfectly for what I was trying to do. I just couldn’t seem to get the code provided in the original tutorial to display the current users new field information. Using current user instead of user id worked like a charm.
Thank you so much for posting your solution if you hadn’t I would still be stuck.
This is harrowing from Adam’s checkbox solution
Checkbox Test
Thanks for this! I’m just learning my way around WP, and update_usermeta() puts me on the right track. I’m writing a classifieds ads plugin that supports proper monetization, and planned to tie in regular WP users as posters. This will let me store subscription states and account balances without having to implement my own user classes
Hi Justin,
Good stuff! I know I’m pretty late to the party here, but I had an idea. I want users to choose ther country of origin (I work in A very international research lab), probably from a dropdown list, and then have this produce a little flag belw ther avatar / in ther biog.
I was thinking of having each country in dropdown relate to a 2 or 3 letter code, then have the flag image called from a huge library by
<img src="path/countries/flag-.jpg">Obviously I’ve not written it in full. Is that possible or practical? I’m very new to wp and php and am learning by looking and tweaking. I think I’m learning how to use php and manipulate the database, but still v early stages!
What I’d like to see as an addendum to this article is how to get that field to show up in the WP User Listing. Easy, I’m sure.
This was very useful, thanks.
Hello,
I am using this custom profile code, and it works great. I have created a field called title and one called Department, and I do have a quesiton.
How can I have these two fields display as read only for everyone else but admin, and allow the admins to edit these. these are fields that I do not want people to be able to edit, so only admins should be able to give each user a different department.
Thank you,
Aaron
Hi,
Does anyone know how to have a dropdown display, like Departments?
I would like to have in the profile a dropdown that was like so:
Accounting
Finance
Technology
Online
Does anyone know how to do this either like this or through an array?
Thank you,
Aaron
I was looking for the rest of your series on using custom fields for book reviews when I stumbled across this post – which was next on my to do list!
It would be great if you could link your series posts together – I hear you can do that with a custom field too
Hey Guys,
I am trying to give user a capability to add a new page by filling out extra fields in the user profile. Using the above code i have added two fields namely:
1) Page Title
2) Page Content
But i want this page to be published when the user clicks the update profile button.
can anyone help me with this???
Thanks
@shashank, if you ever figured out how to do that I’d loveto know. I’ve just asked a similar question in the worpdress forums, http://wordpress.org/support/topic/collecting-richer-data-from-user-profiles-and-creating-pages-from-it, feel free to post there as well if you like. Thanks!
Hey,
Awesome tut bro helped me tons.
there is one part tho im confused and stuck at. how to add checkboxlist (consisting of about 10-15 options) in the user settings page.. and afterwards getting the values on some custom page.
If you can help me with that it would be awesome
cheers
Okay, so I’m almost there. After searching for hours I have found what I am looking for, but this is scaring me (I’m too new!) – could you tell me is it possible to do this via OpenHook and how??? Thanks
Hi, great tutorial it works fine for me, but I’m trying to display the extra field information on the user.php screen.
How can I display an extra field from the user profile into User Manager on the Admin Panel wich call user.php
i use this codes and modiyied
thank you justin i have been using your theme “options”
take care
wow, after a couple years this tut still works. thanks for making this easy.
Is there way to disable the editing of the meta data?
We have an interesting situation here where we need to have a meta field called “user_balance”, and we need to show it. but the user should not be able to edit it ( obviously!), is there a way to make this happen?
Thank you for sharing this knowledge. I applied to my multi-user blog as Twitter and Facebook.
Is there a way to only add this information to the back-end of wordpress when the admin is the only one creating the user accounts?
I have found plug-ins that do allow for extra fields after the account is made but not at the initial creation. Also like Ac above, those fields would be nice to have as read-only by the actual user.
I have the same question as Ken. Is it possible to use this on the -> “Add New User” page? (i.e. user-new.php).
Possibly with a new hook? “
add_action(‘user_registration’,…” or similar??Thanks,
Scott
It is really a nice tutorial.
It adds custom fields to the adduser page.
Is there a way that i can import users with custom fields like (country,region,zip,club) etc.?
thanks a lot.
Justin, very nice tutorial. I have looking at adding a Twitter box here and this was very helpful. Cheers, Richard
I managed to implement your code, Justin. Thanks, you’ve saved my time.
One more thing I need to accomplish, is to allow my user to upload two images on their profile.
I just haven’t come up with any solution regarding file uploads, can you help me?
That was very useful. Was working on a user registration page & didnt realize how to add custom fields – this saved my day…
thanks
Thanks for a great tutorial. Definitely the best one around for adding extra fields. I followed your guide and had no problems.
I do however have a question: Is it possible to disregard empty fields?
In your example, if someone doesn’t have a twitter account it looks stupid with an empty field. Does anybody know how to exclude empty user fields?
Hi
Thanks for a nice tutorial.
I need a thing that gives us a code after or beetween register(sign up)
for exaple : xyutr3
@mikkel — I don’t have the solution right in front of me, but I think it’s pretty straightforward to make display of the extra fields conditional on the value of that field being non-null. I think you’ll find more info on codex.wordpress.org. And I think maybe there’s even some hint of how to do it somewhere in the comments here. Hope that helps a little bit.
I just wrote a tutorial on this, but taking a different approach. In it’s current state it doesn’t use the functions.php page but, instead, a page template for the profile.
One thing I haven’t quite figured out is how to add profile images using an upload field. I can do this outside of wordpress, but inside any core functions require it to be attached using a post ID. Any thoughts on that would be awesome.
The tutorial is Wordpress: Custom Profile Page
The easiest way to add custom fields in registration form is installing s2Member plugin. Its a membership subscription plugin that integrates with Paypal. Very awesome to use.
Hi Justin!
Awesome article, this helped a lot in terms of getting things started on my author profiles. It also worked great sticking this into an author card at the end of posts. I had a quick question though.
I have a game review website and I’m creating an author profile page and your technique for adding fields worked great. I’m just having issues displaying that data in an author page. I duped my archive.php and using that as a base for the author page template. I’m creating the extra fields for xbox live user name, wii friend code #, Games currently played etc. I can code html/css and very light php, and have been researching this a ton your site has brought me the closest to where i need to be. The goal is to create a cool Author section at the top of their related posts. Can you point me in the right direction or show an example of how to display custom field data in an author page? I’ve been experimenting and doing a lot of searching but haven’t been able to get this to work. Any help is greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
-Mike
Great article Justin,
I’ve stumbled across a problem: the custom fields aren’t saved into the ‘old_user_data’ object when accessing the profile_update action hook.
A client wants to know only the fields that a user changes each time they update their profile. The custom fields come through identical in the new and old objects.
Have you experienced this before and is there a way to store these custom fields so we can tell which have changed?
Cheers,
Adrian
Great tutorial. How can I make the new fields mandatory? Thanks.
is there a plugin that do this for me? im a noob at coding and i need to put this in a page. i already made some aditional fields with the register plus redux plugin but i cant show them in a page. thanks!
For anyone trying to add a checkbox, this works for me:
Err that didn’t come out right. Code here: http://snipt.org/xmUl
This is a solution that borrowed from your checkboxes and adapted them to radio buttons
Hello justine,
does this works also on Classipress? It is a classified wordpress theme.
tks
Cris
This is outside the scope of theme development. Assuming your theme doesn’t do anything crazy, it should work fine.
Hi, Is there any way, I can add some fields over the “Add New User” page at the Admin end ? These above said methods displays the extra fields on the Profile page. I want to have some fields which should be displayed while creating a new user and should be saved in the usermeta table.
Of course I don’t want to hack the core…
Hi Justin,
Any idea how to display contents of that custom field inside of another function?
$agent = ”.get_the_author_meta(‘agenttitle’, $user->ID) .”;
echo $agent;
Doesn’t do it.
Just stumbled on this tutorial – needed to add extra fields for storing Google+ and Facebook info for a user. Copy/paste, enter, enter, done! I wish all tutorials were this effective! Thanks!
Great tutorial, but can I save data from radio buttons? I’ve tried the suggestion above, but it doesn’t save the data
This is my code: http://pastebin.com/cbf98YrH
I hope you can help me.
//Mads
Thanks so much for this tutorial Justin. This was such a lifesaver one of my projects I’m working on and is going to be key in another project coming up. This was so awesome!
thanks very much for this tutorial Justin. I have not tried it on my site but already it has given me a full incite to doing so.
Thanks very much
Hi! Is it possible to use this code for per user basis? not only for the admin? I’d love to add this in my future site.
Hope you can get back to me asap!
thanks!!!
Btw, this is great!
If you use textarea, use it’s:
http://pastebin.com/KwSD04XE
Thank you so much!!!
Aside from requiring the extra custom fields that you add with your code above, after you add your code to display the extra fields and the code to save them, when you goto register a new user, will the extra fields be form elements in the reg form for the user to input right away, or just an after thought for me or them to add to their profile after they register?
Also, based on when you say “Note that if you want to add more fields, copy that and change twitter to something unique for each additional field. Just make sure you change each instance of twitter.” Does that mean we have to keep the ‘twitter’ name for the custom field, or each custom field would be called whatever it’s for?
Great post, Justin, it has helped me a lot!!
Is there anyway of showing a list of authors that have that field filled? Or imagine that the field is a radio type, how could I show a list of authors that have selected one or the other option (just if you have the time to answer)? Thank you again!
Found, with get_users() using the meta_key and meta_value fields. Thanks again!
Very helpful, thanks. I’ll be using this for a website that displays each author’s Skype status on the authors.php page template. The additional profile field will be used to store the Skype user ID. I agree that there’s a ridiculous amount of potential for additional profile fields, especially if the edit profile page is realized in the front-end allowing complete customization.
So, I guess this change/addition didn’t find it’s way into version 0.2 of the Members plugin then? I installed the members plugin, and I don’t see anything new about custom profile fields.
I eventually dropped that idea. There are other plugins that handle it. Plus, there’s no 100% reliable way to validate/sanitize custom data. The plugin could make some assumptions, but it wouldn’t handle every scenario.
Thank You, I am going to use this on a diet site so people can track their weight and see how far they have until they get to their goal weight.
Do you know of a way where I can have them update say there current weight and it would keep track of all last saves?
So if they update the weight every 3 days they would end up with a list.
200 lbs
198 lbs
195 lbs
and so on and so one.
I would love a way to make this automatic/ish for the end user.
Reading this gave me a very great idea on my next project. Thank you.
Hi,
Thanks so much for this helpful article!
I used this on a site I built for a bike racing team, so the guys could add info from two select lists (racing category and age group). The selections are definitely saved and can be seen in the team list on the front end, but when the user logs in to edit his profile, the previously-set options are not selected and will be lost if the user doesn’t set them again before saving his profile.
Is there a better way to do this, or do you know of a way to force-select the options in the user profile page?
cheers,
pq
This is no longer working, would be great if you could update it, Justin!
Nathan
I found I had to change the top part to
value=”ID, ‘twitter’ ) ; ?>”
I wasn’t getting any values from the WP 3.3 system
Sorry, the comment system removed part of the code
echo get_usermeta($user->ID, $metaname )
in the value startment
sorry again. The $metaname is from my code
echo get_usermeta($user->ID, ‘twitter’ )
That works.
Thanks, Justin, this was exactly what I needed. Only problem was that I was using a textarea instead of an input field, which broke it. Tiago’s comment above really helped:
http://pastebin.com/KwSD04XE
Also, I noticed that update_usermeta has been deprecated since 3.0. The new function seems to be identical, just with an underscore between user and meta:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/update_user_meta
Really Cool description. Thank you for sharing it.
So we had a developer create wordpress blog who i believe used this exact code to create profile fields for our users, I am trying to take this now a step further. The two custom fields we have are Location and Program, where the user can indicate where they are and what program they are with. I am trying to create a page that filters on these two fields, so for all the users who have Rome, Italy it will return all the bloggers who have this. Or if someone clicks on a Program title it will filter all the users who have that program name. Can anyone help me get started on how to accomplish this?
The two fields currently just pull the text:
Any help would be most appreciated.
sorry it keeps erasing, tried to surround it with tags
Thank you, thank you, thank you for this. I have been searching the internet for almost a week for this solution for my members listing wordpress site. For someone who doesn’t know much about php, your directions were very clear and easy to follow/ implement. Good Job!!!
Hello,
I have learned from your and other websites about how to add custom fields to the wordpress profile page. Is there a way to place them between the “Biographical Info” text box and the “Change password” field? I want to add 7 custom fileds to the profile page, but want them placed in this exact spot. How can I do this? Is this something that may require javascript? Please advise. Thanks in advance!
Thank you Justin for this great tutorial!
Also thank’s a lot to Chris Silverman who noticed that update_usermeta has been deprecated since 3.0 and update_user_meta should be used instead.
Works perfectly with 3.3.1.
Thank’s again!
Hi,
Your tutorial is really helpful. Currently i’m using the plugin “Cimy User Extra Fields”. But i want the repeating field to add user achievements which had icon and textarea for each achievement.
Can you help me how to implement it?
Thanks in advance.
thxs man i will use it in future for own site!!!
Hi,
I am trying to add 2 custom fields to my user profile:
for some reason when I click update profile the entered information doesn't stay. However it does work with input type. Could you help me to save the entered information for select and textarea type fields?
thanks,
natalya
Hi,
I am trying to add a field that I’ve created using your method above. It works fine on the profile page, but I’m trying to integrate it with an idea found on this thread:
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/custom-edit-profile-page
I am not using CIMY extra user fields. The text box for updating the field shows fine but it is not updating. I am wondering if there is an input value I need to use that utilizes the save_extra_user_profile_fields function.
Any thoughts? Thanks!
This is really useful. Thanks so much!
This is exactly what I’m looking for, thanks! I have modified it slightly so that the input field is a custom textarea field instead. It works, given that the data that I save in the user profile shows up on my website. However, once the data is saved in the user profile, what has been entered is no longer visible in the textarea box itself in the WP user profile page.
Here is my code, any help truly appreciated, thanks!
I did exactly as Justin Tadlock told me to do in his tutorial. The field can be displayed. But it can’t be saved. Why? The code I put in the file functions.php is as follow:
using this code (and creating the respective files) you can fully customize CSS and jQuery of the Profile page:
No need to c&p each field:
2.5 years old, and the code still works like a charm. thanks! justin is a real life saver.
yes it works like a charme, but there are some deprecated functions this days
http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/update_usermeta
I followed Justin’s instructions exactly and get some author info displayed with posts, including author’s username, avatar, and biographical information, but no Twitter username. Any suggestions?
Figured it out – a css issue. I removed ‘class=”twitter clear”‘ and works great!