Streamlining : User Profile Plug In vs Users vs Contacts

[SaltyFog]

Now I know Joomla is a collaborative effort, and it's what makes it so much fun, annoying and of course - messy.

We have a multitude of gurus all chiming in with extensions, code snippets, core hacks, tweaks, tips and ultimately patches for all the things everyone can imagine.

What there does seem to be a lack of though is consistency.

There's loads of ideas a weekend coder can throw out, but too, with all the sites I've made with Joomla over the years I have seen a standard pattern of disarray that really should be attempted to be address.

Joomla 2.x is awesome. It's so far superior to 1.5 that all the growing pains of 1.6 and 1.7 were totally worth it.

BUT. There's always a but... Sections and Categories drove me mad, they were relatively pointless overall, and you couldn't make an article unless you made a category unless you made a section.. arrrggg.

Almost all of our clients have a need for user details.
Some only need to sign up with an email and that's it.
Later we may want Virtuemart (or the like), or a form or something that requires an address, and a phone number and so on.
So we have Contacts for that - or the extension or the component has the feature added. We show hide, click, adjust, re-enter for "this new component" and complain the "auto" features never link correctly.

By the end of the day though the user and the admin have at least three places for things to edit, and god forbid we try to add a newsletter feature.

So now with Joomla 2.x we have the user profile plugin and it's great! It's got the barebones we need in one place.

But it's totally different in the DB than Users is... So here's my "wtf?" moment.

We have a _users table. We have the id, email and name etc.
Why couldn't the user plugin just be "enabled" and write to that table in the same way? This plugin was made as a whole different format?
The same goes for the Contact "Categories" vs the User "Groups"

Really? We needed two ways and separate tables to do the exact same thing?

Virtuemart won't pull from User Profile - or Contacts - and Community Builder doesn't do it either, and if we replace the core registration with either, we have to fight with all three bits to get the data as we need it.

So the idea...
Merge the user profile plug in with the user registration "core" and be done with it.
Never mind adding the option for "custom fields" - but you could offer the option to RENAME a field - without a core hack.
Someone would always make a plugin anyway to "fill a gap" and that too could write to the same table.
Merge the Contacts component into that same user "core". With all the same features, but add a "yes no show as contact" button.

Add tabs like you did with the "system Configuration"
So that we have a one stop shop for everything "User" related.

Components and others can simply access the now pre-existing data and should they require their own bits - like avatars or what have you then they can write to their own table. But initially it saves so much time for all involved (except you core coders of course)

Lastly, in this new "user area" one would simply use the drop down areas like normal to complete the details required, and we wouldn't have to repeat the same tasks over and over again.

Tip and tricks to pull data out of the User tables would be so much easier - and standardized.

As for how to implement it?
Well it's all already there, just have all this stuff write to the same table...
The only big deal would likely be some find and replacing with new value titles and the tab admin page thing (make it like global configuration)

and no, I don't have the coding skills to do much of that, but I'd happily help a coder organize it... and I can of course follow any tasks assigned to assist.

So there you have it... my two cents on making a thing a bit less confusing.

[stutteringp0et]

The idea of a user profile plugin is given in the default installation. It's just an example, a suggestion of how it might be implemented. I'm using it in one of my sites - heavily modified, because the example isn't a one-size-fits-all solution to the user profile problem.

Successful implementation of a profile plugin really hinges on the number and types of fields required. In my implementation, I required a much more fine-grained and accurate time-zone selection - a much more detailed date selector and a time selector (something not offered by default joomla field types), so I had to implement these things for myself - along with about a dozen other field types that Joomla doesn't offer (like a google maps/lat-lon selector type field).

Simply offering a more bare-bones, yet more advanced plugin that offers field renaming isn't something that will be useful to the majority of sites.

I can whole-heartedly agree with you about using tabs for info-display. One thing that really chaps my hide is that I'm limited to one user-profile plugin visible in the front-end (while the back-end can have as many as you care to code, in the tabbed interface you asked for). That was something I had to code for myself - but then again, user profiles aren't a one-size-fits-all type of item.

Not having "coding skills" is going to hold you back where this is concerned. You can, however, find people who are experienced in creating and implementing these types of things right here in the forums.