Early this morning, just past midnight my time, I put out 1.0 releases of Advanced Forum, Advanced Profile Kit, and Author Pane in both D5 and D6 with the exception of APK D6 which still needs a lot of work. I was trying for a 4/1 release just for fun but they're showing up as 3/31 for me (though one person reported it says 4/1 for them). If you've been using the RCs, there's not much change.
[Note: The project that was supposed to fund some of this collapsed which means everything is going to take longer. I'm still working on the modules and will get to 1.0 soon as I'm able but I'm doing this for free so it's not top priority anymore. I'm hoping to have 1.0 of everything except possibly APK for D6 out in February. APK D6 depends on exactly how much I decide to put in the 1.0.]
There are a lot of modules that make up a forum in Drupal. Advanced Forum attempts to make it easier for users by allowing many of those modules to have their stuff show up in the author section of the forum posts. It does this by making use of the preprocess system built into core of Drupal 6 (and backported into Drupal 5). For those not familiar with the preprocess system, it's a wonderful thing. For any template file on your site, any module out there can add variables to it just by implementing the preprocess hook.
I've started converting Coulee Region ONLINE, which was the basis of the user profile tutorials, to using advanced profile. So I have some preliminary docs for converting from the tutorial:
User Profiles Version 3 is no longer just a tutorial. I have taken as much as I could of version 2 and put it into the Advanced Profile module. By using Panels 2 as a base, I can provide a base to build on and a bunch of building blocks which non programmers can use to put together a customized user profile.
The third incarnation of my user profiles tutorial, this time in module form, has arrived. I'd like to introduce the Advanced Profile module. It still needs work and isn't feature complete, but it's a good start and available to play around with.
There are a lot of modules involved in making a fancy user profile. To get just a bare bones profile showing user entered profile data and their recent posts, you need (dependent modules listed under each main module):
User Profiles version 3 is a complete rewrite of version 2 using Panels 2 as a base and incorporating much of the grunt work into the Advanced Profile module. This tutorial serves partially as docs for the module but also goes beyond that to demonstrate what you can do with it.
As of February 6, 2008 I am marking this tutorial as deprecated. You can do everything in here with Advanced Profile faster and easier. It's still in alpha but is less buggy than this nearly year old tutorial. It's had a good run and made a lot of people happy but it's time to move on.
A big part of any social networking site is the user profiles. Profiles let your users get to know each other and put a face on the anonymous internet. They can be basic, with little more than name, join date, and a few facts, or elaborate and complex. It all depends on the needs of your community.
