Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Customising the user profile layout

Getting Started - (Drupal 6.x)
Step 1 - is to override the default User Profile page layout by uploading a custom user-profile.tpl.php* file to your active theme folder.

Drupal will automatically detect the presence of your custom user-profile.tpl.php and override the default user profile layout. To make this happen, you need to rebuild the theme registry, which you can do by clearing the caches (for example using the button on the admin/settings/performance page), or simply by visiting the admin/build/modules page.

* note that in Drupal 6.x, your custom user profile layout file name uses a hyphen, instead of an underscore.

Step 2 - is to customise your user-profile.tpl.php layout file.

By default, all user profile data is printed out with the $user_profile variable. If there is a need to break it up you can use $profile instead.

As an example, the following snippet inserted in your custom user-profile.tpl.php will display the default user profile layout.



<?php print $user_profile; ?>



Available variables:

$user_profile: All user profile data. Ready for print.
$profile: Keyed array of profile categories and their items or other data provided by modules.

To check for all available data within $profile, insert the following snippet at the bottom of your custom user-profile.tpl.php.



Available variables


The following is a list of variables that is available to your custom user-profile.tpl.php.


<?php print '
'. check_plain(print_r($profile, 1)) .'
'; ?>



How to use these snippets
Simply copy and paste these snippets into your custom user profile layout file and upload it to your active theme folder. Check to make sure that the snippet you are using is compatible for the version of Drupal you are using.

It's recommended that you test your customised user_profile.tpl.php(Drupal 4.x or Drupal 5.x) or user-profile.tpl.php file (Drupal 6.x) on a test installation before adding to a live site.

Adding new snippets
Simply click on the ADD NEW CHILD PAGE link below and create a new handbook page. Include any dependencies, such as which version of Drupal you have tested the snippet with or extra modules that need to be enabled for the snippet to work.

PLEASE NOTE! The following snippets are user submitted. Use at your own risk! For users who have setup drupal using an alternate database to the default (MYSQL), please note that the snippets may contain some database queries specific to MYSQL.

No comments: