Thread

Hello,

First off, thanks to the EE team for their hard work and quick response time in the forums!

My question is about the suitability of EE for a client project I’ve just started.  It’s a non-profit professional organization with several hundred members.  Part of their needs for a site re-design involve creating individual member accounts (which EE can handle, no problem), allowing members to update their own profile info (check again), and communicating with them (3 for 3).

My question in particular involves whether there is some way to scrape the profile info of all the members and make it available as a directory:  they want to be able to auto-update it whenever a member changes his/her info.  Then, make it available online to them behind a password protected section.  It wouldn’t necessarily have to be available via the member’s profile page (though that would be ideal), so long as I could gather the info and publish it somewhere else.

Does EE support something like this natively?  If not, is there a plugin/extension anyone knows about?  Failing that, do you have any suggestions how to go about doing it?  I suppose I could just generate it myself, via custom SQL queries…

Thanks!

Do you mean something like the member list? The other option is to use a weblog, where each member is an entry in that weblog.

You can just do a custom query. Something like:

{exp:query sql="SELECT m.member_id, m.screen_name, m.email, m.url, c.m_field_id_1 AS city, c.m_field_id_2 AS state, c.m_field_id_3 AS organization FROM exp_members m LEFT JOIN exp_member_data c ON m.member_id=c.member_id"}

<b>{screen_name}</b>

{organization}

{city}, {state} {zip_code}

{email}

{/exp:query}

Would return you a membership list of ALL members. If you wanted to limited to a specific group (example: staff or paid members), then you’d add a where clause.  Custom fields would be things like organization, city and state, etc.  You’d pull that data out of the exp_member_data table instead of the exp_member table.

Additionally, with formatting you could have the list be two or three columns, etc.  The template would always pull the most current data. I would just use the current date to indicate when the directory was updated, otherwise you’d need to do a second query that sorted by modification date, take the newest date, then used that as a last modified date.

Ah, thanks to you both.  So it’s something of a mixture of your two suggestions:  I was not aware of the public facing member profile / member list area, but that’s a good start.  So I could create my own custom fields for the member list, since by default there’s not a full complement of bio info:  First/last name, phone, address, etc.

Where does one create custom fields for member data?  It’s not in the same place / way as for weblogs, correct?

Thanks again.

Admin -> Members and Groups -> Custom Profile Fields. =)

Quick to reply, like always.  Thanks Lisa!