In any community there will always be information you want to capture about your members which is not provided within the core product. These may be information needed for administration purposes, or items which you wish to have displayed within profile, or content items. In the IPS Community Suite, we provide the ability to set up many of these, grouping in a way in which is appropriate to your site.
Profile fields can be set up within the following location within your ACP
Members -> Member Settings -> Profiles -> Profile Fields
Profile field list
Clicking on the Create New button in the top right will allow you to set up a new grouping for profile fields, similar to what you see above with the Personal Information section. To add a new field to a group, select the + at the side of the relevant group.
Clicking to add a new field will show you the following screen. You will see I have selected text as the field type on this occasion which will let a user enter information into a text box.
New profile field entry
You can see settings here you can use to set up a maximum length and even using Regular Expressions to validate the data that is entered. You will note that there is no "Required" element shown here. This is because we have profile completion set up. If you do not have quick registration set up to use profile completion, you will also see a "Required" checkbox which can be selected.
In addition you can set up where the information is shown, how it is shown, and its behavior with regards to being filled in. Do you want this to be edited once it is filled in? No? Not a problem, just de-select the "Member can edit value" and it will only allow this to be entered once.
New profile entry
What is important to note on the screenshot above, is the "Display Format for..." sections. These will appear only if you have the corresponding settings to make these viewable, and were introduced in version 4.4 of the Invision Community platform. So for example, above we have "Show to staff" set for the "Show with members content submissions". If we switched this not to show, then you would not see the "Display format for topics" option.
The display formatting sections by default will display just the field contents. However you can display the item stored in the field in any way you wish, by selecting "Use Custom Formatting". You will then be shown the following field for adding your own formatting code
Display Formatting
This is where you can enter HTML along with the placeholders provided to display the information in any manor that you choose. This is how they will then be displayed in that area (Profile or topic).
Note: Prior to the 4.4 version, this is a single field named "Display Format" and applies to both areas. {title} and {content} should be used instead of the ones below.
If you add the following code to the example field we set up, the placeholders {$title} and {$content} will be replaced with the title of the custom field, and the content that is entered by the user
<strong>{$title}:</strong> {$content}
You will see once you have set up your profile fields the members can then add the information from within their profiles.
Profile Field Completion
Depending on if you have setup of your profile fields to be searchable, these can also be searched using the member search form on your site
Profile Field Search
And of course, they will show up in various areas of the site, using the formatting in which you have set to your own liking.
Formatting on Posts
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