I’d try to use Xprofile for managing profile fields. There’s a lot of baked-in goodness with the Xprofile component.

Obviously, I don’t know what will work in your situation, but it seems like name matching is reasonable. You could probably also extend the Xprofile Groups and Fields classes to add some sort of persistent-ID parameter…[Read more]

You can get the profile field groups and fields by using the function:

$groups = bp_xprofile_get_groups( array( 'fetch_fields' => true ) );

With this information, you should be able to determine whether a field exists and what its ID is.

Best,

-David