[wendel-brume]

LOL, my thoughts exactly! Now I’m in contact with an outfit in India to see what it would take to code the site in Joomla!

What a rabbit hole this stuff can be!

[wendel-brume]

Here’s a Joomla! plugin that does what I want, except it’s for Joomla!:

http://boygj.com/juser-204-extended-joomla-registration

Excerpt:

• Ability to extend registration form with unlimited additional fields

• Different types of fields like Check Boxes, Radio Buttons, Select List, Text Field, Data

• Ability to create your own list of values to choose for fields of type Select List,

Check Box, Radio Buttons

Does anyone know of a WordPress/bbPress plugin that will do this?

[wendel-brume]

Yeah, ‘occupation’ is already there at the registration screen, but I need it to be a required field, and I need it to be a dropdown list that I populate with a fixed set of choices. I suspect I’ll end up going with bbPress since it looks like the deep integration (when it actually works) will do the backend on the cookies that I’ll need. When I asked about this at Simple:Press they said they might add custom fields sometime, and even if they do I’ll have to write the cookies.

[wendel-brume]

@swaymedia: At this point I have to say, neither, because they aren’t doing the one thing that will make monetizing a site possible – collecting important data about my audience that I can share with a potential advertiser.

We -must- have the ability to get a relevant piece of information about our audience that tells our potential advertisers something about the audience member’s buying habits. For my site, I need to know the occupation of my visitors so ads can be targeted based on that data point. I need a way to require that that bit of information be collected at registration.

Neither bbPress nor Simple:Press do that. And that’s absurd, because it’s THE only way to monetize a website through advertising. And it’s being ignored. Screwing around with fonts and colors is irrelevant in the face of this need. I really don’t understand it.

[wendel-brume]

It appears that the ‘deep integration’ between bbPress and WordPress will provide the basis for doing this, I’d need to be able to re-code the registration screen to make the ‘occupation’ field a required field. I also want it to be coded so it’s a dropdown list of choices that I determine.

This issue is way huge for anyone wanting to monetize a website through advertising. Advertisers on the web want to know who your audience is before they will pay reasonable CPMs. I’m showing videos that will eventually incorporate ads, and I want the site to know how to identify a registered visitor so that the video ads can be targeted based on their self-identified occupation.

I also need the forum to be incorporated into a WordPress page, the way I have a test of Simple:Press set up here:

http://architecturecartoon.com/forum/

Is there a relatively simple way to make bbPress look like that?