Joomla, by default, has a very straightforward and simple registration process.
There are only a few pieces of information that are required.
A name, a user name, a password, and an e-mail address, and that's it.
And with that tiny little bit of information, you can have an account on a Joomla
Web site.
That's great for people who want to encourage registration for their site,
but the flipside is, on a site like this one, where we are working with
distributors, we might want to collect a bit more information about those
distributors as part of the registration process. And so things like
address, phone number, or a Web site, for example, might be things that we want
to additionally add.
If there are generic things like that, Joomla
has a way of extending some of those user registration fields built into Joomla's
core itself.
If you are working with something very specific, and you need to track very
particular kinds of information that are not generic sorts of things that come with Joomla,
you're going to need a third-party extension to extend Joomla's
user registration functionality.
And people usually use extensions like Community Builder, or JomSocial for
extending registration functions.
It's kind of a really big extension to solve this little problem, but this is
normally the way that it's done.
But if you only need to add a little bit of more basic information, like address,
or phone, or Web site, that kind of thing, that is available within Joomla's
core, we just have to enable it.
And so I am going to show you how that works right now.
So here under Extensions > Plug-in Manager, all the way down to the bottom of the
page, on page 3 of our plug-ins, look for the plug-in called User - Profile, and go
ahead and click on that. We are going to Enable this plug-in, and then switch to
their Basic Options tab.
These are the additional fields that you can enable for Joomla's
registration process, and for editing profiles within Joomla.
There is a whole list of them here,
and every single one of these fields has -- more or less, every single one of
them has three options.
You can make it a Required field,
you can make it an Optional field, or Disabled.
So Required would indicate that there is a star by it; you have to fill it out as
part of the registration process.
Optional would be the field is there, but you don't have to fill it in, and
Disabled would mean the field does not show on the Web site.
So by default, when we enable this plug-in, pretty much all of these are
optional by default, and we can change those and modify them however we like.
So for example, for my distributors, I would like to know about their Address,
their City, their Region; maybe not their Country, because at this point, we
only have distributors in the US, so maybe I will disable the Country. And their Zip Code,
I want their Phone number, and I want their Web site. But there are some other
things that are on here too.
Favorite Book, nah, I don't really care about their favorite book.
I don't really care about them from a biography perspective, which is what this
About Me thing means;
I don't need a biography of the distributor,
so I am going to set that as Disabled.
I have Terms Of Service, and the terms of service article.
This is improved in Joomla! 3.
Previously, we had a terms of service statement here that we could require or not
require, but we had no way of stating what the terms of service were.
So now we have the ability to link to an article inside of our article
manager. If you have a terms of service article, you could specify that here, and
then require people to agree that the terms of service as part of their
registration on the Web site.
However, I don't have a terms of registration document, so I am just going to go
ahead and disable that.
Notice that optional is not an option on Terms of Service; you can't just
say, well, maybe I'll agree to it, or maybe I won't; you either do, or you don't,
and then you are allowed to register, or you are not.
So I am just going to turn it off.
And then finally, Date of Birth; I am going to make that Disabled as well.
So I have allowed the first bunch of options, and I have Disabled the book, About
Me, Terms Of Service, and Date of Birth.
Now, this is for the user profile fields for registration on the front-end of the
Web site, and at the administrator side of the Web site, so in the back-end, when you
create a new user, you should be able to enter this information as well.
Scrolling on down the page a little bit further here to user profile fields for
editing, this is what is going to be available for Joe when he logs into the
Web site, and he gets the menu option to edit his profile.
What additional options would be there when he is editing; not when he is just
creating his user login.
So in general, these are probably going to match, so the Address, and so forth,
the ZIP Code, the Phone, and the Web site; I will leave them all as Optional.
I am going to Disable the Favorite Book, About Me, and Date of Birth.
Notice that Terms Of Service is not listed here, and that's by design. It's
a feature, not a bug.
The reason why is, you can agree to do the Terms Of Service as part of
registering for the Web site, but later, you can't just say, well, I no longer
agree to the Terms Of Service as you are editing your profile. That's why
it's not listed here.
So these are all Optional. I have left them Optional up here at the top.
I could certainly require any of these pieces of information that I want.
I have just gone ahead and left them all Optional, and then I am going to say Save & Close.
So let's just take a quick peek at the front-end of the Web site, and see how
this impacts our editing the profile form. When I Login here, and I enter
Joe, and 123456, and I say Login, my Edit your profile button comes up here on the side.
When I click that, I now, just as I had before, I have the ability to change my
Name, User Name, Password, Email address;
I have my basic settings, which I had before, but now underneath, I have these
additional fields for my User Profile.
They are marked Optional, and I can fill them in if I want, or not, and then I can
Submit those changes, or I can Cancel out of this.
So that is how the additional fields here work for Joomla
in its registration process, and editing those profiles.
They are available both in the front-end and on the back-end of the Web site.