Question Is there a way to add new profile fields?

I'd like to add more profile fields and Additionally I'd like to have them added below the username and what not in posts. For example we are a gaming site and it'd be great to be able to add online ids and put them with the user info next to posts.

G'day, Michael, and welcome to Kunena.

This is a fairly commonly-asked question. Kunena is open source software, provided "as is" and licensed under the provisions of the GNU GPL licence, which means that it's freely available and can be modified in whatever ways you may like. Of course, once you have modified Kunena we cannot provide any guarantees that the software will continue to work nor will the community necessarily be able to help you.

To answer your very general question, the general answer is that you can display whatever data you like by modifying the Kunena template. The general guide to developing your own Kunena template is contained in How to create a template for Kunena and K 1.6 Template . Creating your own Kunena template is not something that I would personally recommend novice programmers should undertake (especially when you are talking about needs that you have in mind) but, if that's what you want to do, all the information should be there.

Adding new fields to the Kunena user profile is not an easy task by any stretch of the imagination because it involves:

(a) adding the extra columns to the xxx_kunena_users table;
(b) modifying the Kunena user profile software to display these new fields and to change them; and
(c) modifying the template so that you can display the relevant fields on the messages.

Alternatively, you could re-use one of the existing data items in the Kunena user profile for your specific purposes.

As I implied earlier, this is not for the faint-of-heart and I would not attempt to do this unless there was a serious business case to be made for trying. If you're able to make these changes yourself, then I wish you good luck. If you are not able to make these changes yourself, but you still want to proceed, there are many good contract developers whom you could engage to carry out the work for you.

Re-use, hmm, Couldn't I simply change one of the field names that I know most don't use to what I'm looking for? I'm guessing I'd do that in the SQL table or the PHP file.

It all really depends on what you want to do. Because your questions are rather general in nature, I am only able to give you general, non-specific answers.

Yes, you can re-purpose any existing fields and call them something else. I assume, because you used the word "fields" in the plural, that you have a number of extra attributes about your users that you want to display. Most of these changes should be able to be done if you are good with PHP. There are several PHP files that need to be changed; off the top of my head I can't tell you which ones they are.

In general terms - and from what I've observed in my years of managing web-based discussion forums - most people do not actually make many changes to their user profiles. Therefore you have to weigh up, against the cost of allowing for people to have these additional benefits, the very real possibility that the take-up of these additional features may be quite low. I'll just put that on the table as something for you to consider.

If you want people to give some extra information about themselves (e.g. online gamer id) they can use their signature or their "personal message" for those things. As you can see, in my profile here, my signature ("if you think that I'm wrong ...") appears at the foot of each message and my personal message ("I'm just a user, mate") appears below my avatar image on the right of my messages. This is a no-cost solution if you want to encourage your users to make use of features that already exist. But, as I've indicated earlier, I do not think your most difficult challenge will be to make the PHP / SQL changes; I think the truly difficult challenge will be encouraging your users to avail themselves of the new features after you've implemented the change. Look around you here, at this forum at www.kunena.org and see how many people have added any additional information like I have done with my profile. I think you'll probably find the same occurs in most other forums. It all depends on your ability to convince your community that there's a benefit to the community in adopting certain practices.

But, that's your decision.

Well if it's that much of a hassle to even rename then yeah, I may as well just stick with sigs and personal text.

As for the lack of of use, I think my forum may eventually have enough use to make them worth the time, but yes, currently like you mentioned it's really not worth it.

Thanks again for the help.