Extend the User Contact Info in WordPress 2.9
December 16th, 2009 by Michael • WordPress Hacks • 20 Comments
Joost de Valk wrote about a month ago a really great article about his idea, to expand the user contact fields (thanks Joost!). In version 2.9 you are able to use this possibility. Here a little example, how you can use this functionality.
First you write your own function in your functions.php of your theme.
<?php
function my_new_contactmethods( $contactmethods ) {
// Add Twitter
$contactmethods['twitter'] = 'Twitter';
//add Facebook
$contactmethods['facebook'] = 'Facebook';
return $contactmethods;
}
add_filter('user_contactmethods','my_new_contactmethods',10,1);
?>
This function does nothing more than expand the array $contactmethods with the fields twitter and facebook. The value behind the fields is used as a label for the input fields. You can also remove existing fields, here the field of YAHOO IM:
// Remove Yahoo IM
unset($contactmethods['yim']);
This fields can be displayed on the author page.
<?php
$current_author = get_userdata(get_query_var('author'));
?>
<p><a href="<?php echo esc_url($current_author->twitter);?>" title="Twitter"> Follow me on Twitter</a></p>
Alternatively you can also use the template tag the_author_meta.
the_author_meta('facebook', $current_author->ID)
That's all behind the 16ht door of our Advent Calendar. 
Have fun expanding your contact fields.
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- Published in WordPress Hacks
- Tags: Advent Calendar, template tag, Theme, WordPress, wp2.9
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jason on
Very usefull ! Thanks guys...
wp2.9, it's for when ?
Well done! I somehow managed to miss the fact that this is for 2.9, not 2.8.6. Small detail, but this looks well worth the improvement.
Keep it up!
This is great, I've been wondering if this was possible because I've been put in charge of the server for a clan's website, and adding more contact fields (like tag, and other things) is really nice.
The downside of this is that I'll have to wait until 2.9 is released in final because I really don't want to upgrade them to a beta release...
Thanks for this useful hint.
As user of Twitter I´m especially interested in the enhancement with the link to the Twitter account.
And folks: WP 2.9 is out now!
Nice feature, do you know what function to add extra userdata so I could use it with wp_insert_user to add in more fields like Country, Address, etc
Really nice easy way to showcase how to extend the author contact information, I think WordPress should include "Twitter/Facebook" by default now.
Awesome! I hated how I had to hardcode everything. I'll definitely use that in my current project.
Fantastic article, I have been searching for a few days on how to do this.
Now, I am using this combined with "Members List" to show users details.
Thanks!
This is awesome, thanks so much for sharing.
I use this in conjunction with:
http://bavotasan.com/tutorials/how-to-display-an-author-list-with-avatars-in-wordpress/
To extend my user info, and I show it on whatever pages I want by using conditional statements in my sidebar.
Thanks again!
great tips, but displaying custom field not working, it returns blank value
How can I do that if I want to add "Phone Number" and "Birth Date" fields to registration page?
Here is a nice article how to do that: http://planetozh.com/blog/2009/12/how-to-per-user-options-in-wordpress/
Change it to your needs.
What if someone does not include the "http://" in the url they submit (with their twitter or facebook url).
I'll get something like this -> http://www.mywebsite.com/www.twitter.com/myname when i click their url on the authorpage.
Is there an option to automatically include the "http://" ?
Oh i got it already
echo esc_url (does the trick)
sorry
I thought i got the solution but it's still not working. esc_url only displays the http:// on the authorpage. But the link is still referring to http://www.mywebsite.com/www.twitter.com/myname ;-(