Hi there,

Sorry for the topic as I know it’s similar to other questions that have been asked, but I haven’t found my exact answer yet.

I am hoping to add an extra field to my registration process that asks people if they are members of a particular group. This data would be queried to an external database (er, if possible – if not I guess we can verify it manually, or take people at their word!).

I would like to then use this data to display their comments in a slightly different manner (indicating they are members).

I am a bit of a loss as to where to start with this, particularly with accessing custom field data in themes. Would someone be able to point me in the right direction?

TIA!

[@zoltok Participant 14 years, 8 months ago]

Ok, update on progress.

I finally found some examples in the forums of people calling profile data. Here’s what I’ve currently got in my template files, this seems to be working:

$user_id = $comment->user_id;
$isMember = xprofile_get_field_data( 'Member', $user_id );
echo 'Member: '. $isMember;

The field is a radio button with only one option. This returns: a:1:{i:0;s:3:”Yes”;}

I know this is outputting some kind of array, but my knowledge gets a little shaky here. How would I target this data to conditionally do something if the value “Yes” is selected?

[@djpaul Keymaster 14 years, 8 months ago]

What precisely are you trying to do? Style a comment if a user is in a particular group? (is that a BuddyPress Group?)

If so, it’d be best to save that in the ‘commentmeta’ when the comment is saved to the database (saves a query per comment, which could get bad quickly). Let us know and we can help.

[@zoltok Participant 14 years, 8 months ago]

Yes, I’m trying to style the comments of a particular group a little differently. The community I’m building is for users and potential clients of a membership-based service. Anyone can sign up, but I’d like to give commenters who are actual members of the service a little bit of a different treatment, so their comments carry more weight. I’m envisioning a small icon that overlays their gravatars indicating they are members.

For the moment I had planned on using xprofile data for this. I don’t have groups enabled (yet), but if we use them in the future, I would like to make them user-controlled for smaller interest groups (whereas membership to this group would be more admin-controlled). We have an external database with the names of all members in it, but I’m not yet sure how to cross-check with that database when users sign up (or if that’s even possible!).

Maybe xprofile data is not the best way to go about this? I know there are role options in WordPress, would this maybe be a better way to handle this? My main concern is ensuring maximum flexibility as the site develops.

[@zoltok Participant 14 years, 7 months ago]

Just wondering, does anyone have any thoughts on this? Still at a bit of a loss as to how to approach this…

[@zoltok Participant 14 years, 4 months ago]

Ok, thought I’d follow up in case anyone tries to do the same thing.

Here’s the code that ended up working:

$user_id = $comment->user_id;
$isMember = xprofile_get_field_data( ‘Member’, $user_id );
if ($isMember == “”) {
} else {
?>

Abonné

<?php
}

No idea how this would be done if you were testing for more than one checkbox though, but for my use (either checked or not), it worked just fine.