[development] Profile module for D6

[Gerhard Killesreiter]

Rowan Kerr wrote:
> The last few projects I've worked on have called for a few enhancements 
> to profile.module, and I was wondering if it would be worth submitting 
> patches for consideration in Drupal 6, or whether profile.module will 
> even survive that long :)

We need something that lets people extend Drupal's user profiles inside 
core. It doesn't have do be the current module but I don't see any 
competitor.

> The updates to profile module will be useful for supporting OpenID 
> attribute exchange, as well as general data integrity of profile data. 

That sounds nice.

> And it doesn't break any of the previous functionality.

That's nice too, but not strictly required as long as people's data is 
preserved.

> New features:
> - multiple-select lists
>   (took the easy way out and stored as serialized data
>   could be improved to store the data in normalized tables)

I really hate serialized data, so an improvent would be welcome, if 
possible.

> - key=>value mapping for select lists
> 
> - data validation for each field
>   (eg. email, numbers, strings, postal code)
> 
> - complex data types (eg. address: street, city, state, etc)
>   (this is not as important as the previous ones but may
>   be useful for some people)

Maybe the more complicated stuff could live in a contrib module?

Maybe it would make sense to let user profiles be cck nodes instead. 
That would avoid a lot of code duplication.

Cheers,
	Gerhard