User profile fields

Template:Moodle 1.8Location: Administration > Users > Accounts > User profile fields

In Moodle 1.8 onwards, administrators are able to create new user profile categories and fields. Profile fields may be a menu of choices, text area, text input or a checkbox (in Moodle 1.9.3 onwards) and may be required or not.

New profile fields will appear on each user’s profile page (and on the user sign-up page in Moodle 1.9 onwards).

For one thing, this means that U.S. users will finally be able to have valid addresses, including *states*, without which an address can be meaningless. (Which state is Springfield in? Oh, 15 of them!) Although it does not place the state/province next to the town & country, which is where it should appear. This means that people from the United States, Canada, Mexico, Russia, Germany, India and any other countries that are composed of states or provinces cannot enter their state or province.

Important

If the site administrator bulk uploads user data via .csv file, it is essential to use the correct convention to represent the new profile field. The convention is profile_field_shortname

Replace 'shortname' with the actual short name used for the new profile field eg. dob. So the field should read something like profile_field_dob.

Also, keep in mind that the shortname must be all lower case to avoid errors when uploading users via a .csv file. This currently is not enforced when creating the shortname. See MDL-17344 [1] for more information.

Examples of use

• House System

Many schools have a 'House' system where students and staff are assigned to a given House. For example, a school has eight houses, named after its founders: Adderton, Coolock, Gorry, Loretto, McAuley, Mercedes, Tighe and Whitty. The site administrator can add a user profile field that offers a 'Menu of choices' to the user. A default value can also be selected. If the administrator decides to bulk upload House data for users via a .csv file, it is important to represent the above array of values as 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 in the file. That is to state, if a user belongs to Adderton House, the value '1' should be entered for the 'House' user profile field in the given record.

• Birthday block (contributed code)

See also

• Using Moodle How can I show ID Number in the user profile form? forum discussion