Getting Cimy Extra user Fields working in WordPress MU

One of the projects I’m working on is a community-based blog system. Because of what I’m trying to accomplish, I have a need to add extra fields to my user’s profile information. Without giving anything away, I need a profile picture, some information on what organization my members belong to, state, and a few other pieces of information from each user to realize the vision I had when I started piecing this project together.

While it is completely possible to go in and hack the core files of WordPress MU to give me the functionality I need, I’d be giving up the ability to upgrade easily on the next release cycle, and for me, that’s just not an option. If at all possible I don’t want to mess with the core files at all.

Cimy Extra User Fields provides all of this functionality and a lot more. Unfortunately, it doesn’t come out of the box as a WordPress MU capable plugin. After looking around a bit, I found that it could be adapted, and I’ve done so, though not to the level I’d like… Just yet.

In the standard WordPress install, Cimy not only adds fields to the user profile, but it also adds those fields to the registration process, along with a customized registration. So far I haven’t gotten this to work with MU, but I haven’t given up yet! I’ll be hitting the WPMU dev forums later to see if I can isolate this, as it would be convenient to add at least two or three of those pieces of information to the initial registration.

The conversion to MU is quite simple, at least as of version 0.99. Part of the process requires “mu-ifying” the way cimy puts data in the database. This prevents the plugin from adding the custom field tables to each and every blog in your WordPress MU setup, and replaces that data with a dingle, global table.

Open cimy_user_extra_fields.php and find the lines that read:

//$wpdb_data_table = $wpdb->prefix."cimy_data";
//$wpdb_fields_table = $wpdb->prefix."cimy_fields";

replace them with the following:

//$wpdb_data_table = $wpdb->prefix."cimy_data";
//$wpdb_fields_table = $wpdb->prefix."cimy_fields";
$wpdb_data_table = "wp_cimy_data";
$wpdb_fields_table = "wp_cimy_fields";

So far, pretty easy. But even if the plugin is active, you’ll never see it. Scroll down to line 323 or so, and look for the following:

function cimy_admin_menu_custom() {
global $cimy_uef_name, $cimy_uef_domain;


add_options_page($cimy_uef_name, $cimy_uef_name, 10, basename(__FILE__), 'cimy_admin_define_extra_fields');
add_submenu_page('profile.php', __('Authors & Users Extended', $cimy_uef_domain), __('A&U Extended', $cimy_uef_domain), 10, basename(__FILE__), 'cimy_admin_users_list_page');
}

Modify the code so that it looks like this:

function cimy_admin_menu_custom() {
global $cimy_uef_name, $cimy_uef_domain;
if (is_site_admin()) {
add_options_page($cimy_uef_name, $cimy_uef_name, 10, basename(__FILE__), 'cimy_admin_define_extra_fields');
add_submenu_page('profile.php', __('Authors & Users Extended', $cimy_uef_domain), __('A&U Extended', $cimy_uef_domain), 10, basename(__FILE__), 'cimy_admin_users_list_page');
}
}

Notice the change? You’ve just instructed the plugin to be vieable only by the WPMU admin user. Thant way it won’t show for anyone else but the site administrators. (and to be honest, it won’t show up at all without it.)

Upload the plugin to your mu-plugins folder and see what happens…

Most likely, nothing at all. That’s OK. Wordpress MU global plugins aren’t ever given the activation signal, so the plugin probably hasn’t created its database tables yet. The simple workaround for this is to move the entire plugin folder from mu-plugins to plugins, go to the plugins administration panel, activate it, then immediately move the plugin back to mu-plugins. The tables will be created and the plugin should work fine. It did for me, at least.

I’d like to thank Marco Cimmino for some excellent work on this plugin. It really is one of the most complex and powerful I’ve seen for WordPress to date, with the exception of things like OWA.

*NOTE: In Googling around to see if anyone else had found solutions for this, I came across an archived IRC conversation between some developers on wpmu that leads me to believe that Marco may have a fully Wordpress MU capable version of Cimy Extra User Fields available very soon. If so, this particular puppy is going to be one very happy camper. Until then, I’ll still be working on a way to get the registration info to show.

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