Displaying Additional Name Fields in Moodle

Starting with Moodle 2.6, you have the ability to display additional name fields. This is helpful when you have users with foreign characters in their names (such as Japan), and you also want to display a name in Roman Characters, or with phonetic spelling. In this tutorial, I will show you how to display additional name fields in Moodle.

How to Display Additional name Fields

  1. Login to your Moodle Administrator Dashboard.
  2. In the navigation menu, click Site administration–>Users–>Permissions–>User policies. The image below shows you what order to click them in.
    Moodle User Policies

    Scroll down to the Full name format section. The default setting is language, which diplays the default “fullnamedisplay” from your language pack. For example in English, it will show first name, and last name by default. Here is an example:
    User profile view

    Replace language with what you want to display in the User profiles. Below is a brief description of the options.

    OptionDescription
    languageThis will show the default fullnamedisplay based on the language pack you are using.
    firstnameThis option will display the first name of the user.
    lastnameThis option will display the last name of the user.
    firstnamephoneticThis field will display the phonetically spelled first name of the user.
    lastnamephoneticThis field will display the phonetically spelled last name of the user.
    middlenameThis option will display the middle name, or initial depending what the user enters.
    alternatenameUsers can enter a different name here, for example a romanized version of their Japanese name.
  3. After entering your preferred settings, click the Save changes button on the bottom. Now, user profiles will show the new fields. They may have to update the fields in the General section of their profile. In my example, I entered the following:
    firstname middlename lastname, firstnamephonetic, lastnamephonetic, alternatename
    Now the user profile looks like this:
    Updated view of name fields in Moodle

Congratulations, now you know how to display additional name fields in your Moodle website!

JB
John-Paul Briones Content Writer II

John-Paul is an Electronics Engineer that spent most of his career in IT. He has been a Technical Writer for InMotion since 2013.

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