Understanding the Joomla 2.5 User Profile Plugin's Basic Options

In our last tutorial, we showed you all of the profile fields that are available within the Joomla 2.5 User Profile Plugin. The fact that users can see and edit each of these fields is controlled within the plugin's paramters.

When you open the plugin's settings within the Joomla 2.5 admin, you'll see two headings under Basic Options:

• User profile fields for registration and administrator user forms
• User profile fields for profile edit form

Under each of these headings, you'll find the same listing of fields.

Each field includes the following options:

• Required
• Optional
• Disabled

So what is the difference between each set of parameters?

Registration and Administrator user forms

The values for User profile fields for registration and administrator user forms control fields users may type in when initially registering for an account. For example, when we set the value for Address 2 to Disabled, this field was not presented to us when we attempted to register for a new account.

Profile edit form

The values for User profile fields for profile edit form control whether or not the user can see and edit these settings. For example, even though we have previously set Address 1 to 1234 Fake Street, when the option is set to disabled we cannot view the value or edit it within the User Profile page.

In summary, with the Basic options you can control both

1. the fields users see when they are registering for a new account.
2. the fields users can see / edit within their own user profile.