One profile page to rule them all
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If you have integrated your bbPress with WordPress, you must have at least once thought about the problem of your users having two separate interfaces for modifying their profile settings.
Furthermore, if your bbPress and WordPress both use a good deal of plugins, you end up with a situation where some settings (say, email notifications for new WordPress posts) have to be set on a WordPress profile page, whereas other settings (for example email notifications for new forum topics or replies) must be set through the bbPress interface. This will confuse your average user so much that they will simply not use any of your website’s fancy features at all.
It would therefore be good to have just one user profile page that would merge everything from the two together. Preferably, this should also be a page that could be displayed within the website template, so that it would really look like being part of the website, and not behind a completely different-looking interface as is the case with WordPress user pages. (Those also scare people.)
Would this be doable?
I am personally not much of a coder, so I don’t know all the details of what is going on when the WordPress and bbPress profile pages get served, and how various plugins get to modify that process by adding new fields and buttons on those pages.
I assume, however, that the most difficult thing for a “one profile page to rule them all” sort of an approach that I am thinking about here would be to keep track of additions to those profile pages. It should somehow be able to notice that some new bbPress or WordPress plugin has modified one of those user profile pages, and incorporate those changes to the merged profile page that is actually displayed to the end user.
I would love to hear some input from those of you who know more than I do about the behind-the-scenes activity when it comes to user profiles in bbPress and WordPress. What do you think, how difficult would a plugin like this be to code?
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