Design and Prototyping for Drupal

Step 4: Create the User Profile

By default, Drupal gives each user its own profile, which you can see by going to site.url/user in your browser. However, there really isn’t much to show on this page; for example, Figure 12-17 shows a screenshot of my /user page before adding anything to it.

Figure 12-17. Drupal’s core user profile; cute, but not very useful

In order to include the contact information and other interesting bits that we’ll need to include with the Event page, we’ll need to install a module. The Profile2 module (drupal.org/project/profile2) is Drupal 7’s answer to Drupal 6’s Content Profile (drupal.org/project/content_profile), as well as an interesting replacement for Drupal 7’s core Profile module. With Profile2, you can create different “types” of profiles and associate them with different roles, add fields, and other useful stuff. For right now, we just need the basics: contact information, website, etc. To do that, after you install the Profile2 module, you’d choose Structure→Profile Types from the admin menu. The Profile Types screen will show you a “Main Profile” type; that’s what we’re going to choose to start with (Figure 12-18). The Profile2 module essentially treats profiles as if they are content types, which means you can add fields just as you would with a content type.

Figure 12-18. The profile type screen from Profile2

For our purposes, we’re going to add ...