Explaining User Profile

Revision as of 05:16, 8 March 2013 by Patricia Schmidt (Talk | contribs)

Objective

This article will explain the User Profile in JomSocial, what it is, and how it works, as well as explaining some common misunderstandings when it comes to the relationship between the Joomla and JomSocial User.

What is the User Profile?

Joomla is a very powerful CMS system, but when it comes to extending the user object, it is not very good solution to use. In latest versions of Joomla, some effort is put into enhancing the user object with custom fields you can set using the built-in User - Profile plugin that is shipped with Joomla 2.5 and above; however, that is definitely inadequate for the needs of a user profile in a social network.
This is where the native Joomla profile manager will stop and the new profile manager, JomSocial's, will begin. For this transfer of control to occur, the Joomla User - Profile plugin must be disabled.

What can i do with User Profiles?

Many things that you can not do with native Joomla. User profiles are core of social network environment, so within your profile you will be able to

  • See other profiles
  • Become friend with other people (profiles)
  • Send private messages tto other profiles
  • Upload video and photo galleries or view others
  • Control privacy of your profile or block others
  • Have different set of Custom Profile Fields for your profile
  • and so many more... yes, even deleting the profile.

Common misconception

Very usual misconception is that once JomSocial is installed it somehow creates its own user. More often then not, you will hear people asking questions like this

  • Will my Joomla Users work with jomSocial Users?

All questions of this type, while at first sight quite logical, are actually, redundant and not necessary.
On Joomla site, there is no such thing as component user. Not just with jomSocial, this is true for 99% of known extensions on JED. At this time, we are only aware of one single component with its own user, but if you already using jomSocial, there will probably be absolutely no need to use mentioned component.

How this works in practice

It actually works very good, because it allows multiple components to share single user across whole site

How exactly jomSocial implements this

When user is created it is stored in Joomla Users database. All mandatory fields such as Name, Username, Email and Password are stored into Joomla #__users table
jomSocial then use those information,, and extends it with Custom Profile Fields, Friends System, Private Messaging, Photo and Video Galleries etc... however, jomSocial will never control the session of the user, will not handle the logins/logouts or activations and passwords resets, nor it will handle any registration emails. All this is strictly handled by Joomla itself.

Help: I see some strange profile after user is activated

Joomlaprofile.png
If after login, you see the page as on screenshoot above, don't worry, it is just a Joomla Profile page that users should never supposed to see, but they did because native Joomla login form was used for their login.
This often happen after users verify their account
Some popular Joomla template Clubs, override this view and include the Joomla Login fields on that screen. If this is the case with your site, please navigate to
ROOT/templates/YOURTEMPLATE/html
If in this directory you find another folder named com_users rename it to something else.
If after this you still see the login form from Joomla, kindly contact your respective template provider for more information about how to remove it as it really shouldnt be there to begin with. Default Joomla behavior is to give users a button to get back on the Home page of the site, not login form.

See Also