Profiles in LiveWhale are customizable data types for people or things. Their main advantage over blurbs is that they have easily customizable fields and include an image by default. You may use them for faculty/staff, departments, initiatives, or any other content you want to be able to customize and include using widgets.
Set a profile type to global if you plan to use the type for multiple groups. An example type to make global would be faculty, staff, or student profiles. Since most of your offices and departments contain faculty, staff, or student this would be a perfect case to use a global profile type. Making a profile type global also gives you the flexibility of moving a profile to another group if necessary.
To add a global profile type:
If you are creating a profile type you know you’ll only use in a single group, make that non-global:
Note: A profile field id (e.g., profiles_121
) will be created for each custom profile field after the type has been saved. This is what you’ll use later in widgets or other custom code.
Profiles can be shared to other groups. When a profile is shared to another group a linked copy of that profile is created if the receiving group accepts the profile. All profile fields of the linked copy will not be editable (locked) unless the profile field is unlocked.
A field should be set as “unlocked” if the content should be tailored to suit the group.
A perfect example for setting a field as “unlocked” would be if you had a faculty member who taught courses for more than one academic department. Perhaps the faculty member’s research or course offerings should be editable (unlocked) for other groups to revise the content to suit their academic department.
The owner of the profile type can unlock or lock profile fields.
Profile field content can be placed with ease in your Profiles details page. The LiveWhale application has a profiles details page that determines the layout of your profile content. Your site’s profile details page may differ based on the design of your site.
For each profile field there is a drop-down menu that contains the following options: body, sidebar, unassigned, and never display. Each of these options goes hand-in-hand with your profiles details page using xphp code.
When you view the source code of your profiles details page you will see xphp code that ties in with your profile type. To view the source code of your profiles details page you can go to a profile and click Edit Source to view the code.
<xphp var="profiles_body" />
This piece of xphp code will gather all profile fields that are set as body. The order of the content will be based on fields listed from top to bottom in your profile type editor.
<xphp var="profiles_sidebar" />
This piece of xphp code will gather all profile fields that are set as sidebar. The order of the content will also be based on fields listed from top to bottom in your profile type editor.
Fields that are set as unassigned will not display in your profiles details page unless explicitly called using xphp. To add an “unassigned” field to your profiles details page:
profiles_9
)<xphp var="profiles_9" />
Set profile fields to “never display” when you want to make content accessible to LiveWhale users but do not to make it publicly accessible on the website.
Since LiveWhale 1.7, you can choose a custom details template to apply to profiles of a single type. For instance, maybe most of your profiles will use /_ingredients/templates/details/profiles.php, but you have a separate template you want to use for faculty profiles /_ingredients/templates/details/profiles-faculty.php.
In earlier versions, you may have accomplished this using a custom module. The integrated solution in 1.7+ should be backwards-compatible with that setup, allowing you to maintain your custom templates. You should remove /livewhale/client/modules/profile_templates during your 1.7 upgrade if that’s the case.
Once a profile type has been created you can add profiles to the type.
Sometimes you don’t want to create a LiveWhale user account for people who just need to update a profile. An example might be that you want to give a faculty member the ability to revise their profile but they don’t need to update anything else in LiveWhale. Just enter the username of the profile owner/editor in the LiveWhale username field that matches with your authentication source (e.g., LDAP). When the user logs in, the LW backend will only give them the ability to edit their set profile(s). Only a LiveWhale administrator can edit the LiveWhale username field.
Note: Deleted profile types will remain in the trash where they can be easily restored (up to one year, depending on your configuration).
You may also delete the item from the profile edit screen:
Note: Deleted profiles will remain in the trash where they can be easily restored (up to one year, depending on your configuration).
Archived profiles are profiles that are no longer current and should only be accessible through a past profiles archive on your web site.
The manage archived profiles screen will list all archived profiles of the current type in your group. It contains many of the same management features as the manage profiles page.
You may want particular profile fields to sync up with an external data source, like a MySQL database, or an LDAP directory of your faculty/staff.
While creating your Profile type, fields such as first name, middle name last name will display a Sync from... drop-down menu where you can select the data attribute from your data source to map
Since LiveWhale 1.7, you can natively export/import profiles via CSV. Choose your profile type and then click Import to view the instructions.
After choosing your CSV and clicking Import, you will be shown a preview of the import/update action and you can choose to proceed or cancel.