Last night there was a discussion as to what could be achieved today as part of a “WordHack” session at WordCamp UK and SimonD tweeted that he would like to be able to add extra user meta fields to the back end user profile page easily.

I tweeted back that it was already easy and so here is the proof of concept code which shows you:

• How to add a user meta field to the page
• How to process the new value when it is updated.

These can the been displayed on the front-end using the standard template tags get_the_author_meta() and the_author_meta()

<?php
/*
Plugin Name: PJW User Meta
Plugin URI: http://blog.ftwr.co.uk/archives/2009/07/19/adding-extra-user-meta-fields
Description: Allows users to configure some random extra meta value.
Author: Peter Westwood
Version: 0.02
Author URI: http://blog.ftwr.co.uk/

Use of the frontend as get_the_author_meta('something') or the_author_meta('something')
*/

class pjw_user_meta {

 function pjw_user_meta() {
 if ( is_admin() )
 {
 add_action('show_user_profile', array(&$this,'action_show_user_profile'));
 add_action('edit_user_profile', array(&$this,'action_show_user_profile'));
 add_action('personal_options_update', array(&$this,'action_process_option_update'));
 add_action('edit_user_profile_update', array(&$this,'action_process_option_update'));
 }

 }

 function action_show_user_profile($user)
 {
 ?>
 <h3><?php _e('Other Contact Info') ?></h3>

 <table>
 <tr>
 <th><label for="something"><?php _e('Something else'); ?></label></th>
 <td><input type="text" name="something" id="something" value="<?php echo esc_attr(get_the_author_meta('something', $user->ID) ); ?>" /></td>
 </tr>
 </table>
 <?php
 }

 function action_process_option_update($user_id)
 {
 update_usermeta($user_id, 'something', ( isset($_POST['something']) ? $_POST['something'] : '' ) );
 }
}
/* Initialise outselves */
add_action('plugins_loaded', create_function('','global $pjw_user_meta_instance; $pjw_user_meta_instance = new pjw_user_meta();'));
?>

Enjoy!

Updated to correctly use the $user/$user_id passed to the actions rather than the global $user_id