Creating profile pages

With Form2Content Pro you can have users create and maintain their own profile page. Distinguishing characteristics of a profile page are that each user has one of them and that the user can maintain the page himself.

This article will show how to create such a type of page. Of course the technique as described in this article is not only limited to a profile page. This technique can be used for every type of page where the user only can maintain one instance of. Other uses could be: an "About Me" page, a company profile, etc.

First you need to create a Content Type that can hold the information the user can edit. For a profile page think of a Content Type with fields like: first name, last name, date of birth, city, hobbies, etc. Let's say we name this Content Type "Profile".

Make sure the following settings have been applied to the Content Type before you continue:

  • The Content Type itself should be published
  • Set the "Publish" option of the article to default "Yes" and "Show in front-end" to "No"
  • Disable some other options in the front-end according to your wishes. You probably don't want to show the Created Date, Published Dates, Access Level, etc. to the user.


Now go to the Joomla Menu Manager and add a new Menu Item of the Menu Item Type "Form2Content Pro => Single Form"

Give the menu a Title, e.g. "My Profile"

In the settings on the right make the following changes:

  • Set "Content Type" to "Profile"
  • Set "Edit Mode" to "Edit existing form or create a new one"
  • Set "Redirect mode" to "The newly created or modified article"

Save the menu.

Let me explain what we did in the last steps:

  • The Content Type was set to "Profile" so that the Content Type this form should work with is the "Profile" Content Type.
  • The edit mode tell Form2Content that it should create a profile for a user when he doesn't have one. When the user already has a profile, this is opened in edit mode so it can be modified. This option also ensures that there will be zero or one Profile for each user.
  • The "Redirect Mode" specifies that when the user has finished editing the profile, he or she gets redirected to the created or modified Profile article.

Content type permissions

The last check before we can test in teh front-end is Joomla user permissions. Make sure you have set registered users to allow at least create own/edit own, preferably at F2C component level.

Now you're ready to go! When a user logs in through the front-end, there will be a menu item called "My Profile" where the user can update his or her profile.

F2C Cheat-sheet

An overview of all template parameters (placeholders for your form data). These are used in your F2C intro and main template to parse the data from your submission forms into the Joomla article.

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