I have been toying with the concept of allowing my members to select between displaying a personal or professional profile. I have as a result a couple of important questions in relation to this setup.

1. If I want all member to select between personal or professional profiles, will the selection process cause the member/s to lose any data or default profile preferences which were set during registration with the default profile active.

2. What happens to the default profile once I have created new 'Personal' and 'Professional' profiles?
Does the registered users information get carried over to newly selected profile?

3. Is there any way to select say 'Personal' profile initially, or does it have to be default first then a new format is selected after registration?

4. What would happen to a members existing points (AlphaUserPoints) if they opted to switch between default and one of the new custom profiles?.

5. Can a member switch back to 'default' profile after having selected 'Personal' or 'Professional' custom profiles?

Example:

Hi, Anthony.

First, please, let me explain how profile works. You can create a various fields and if you don't have any multiprofile enabled, they are displayed in user profile all at once. Values entered in those fields are stored in database.

Now if you created a multiprofile, you choose what fields to display and assigned them to your new multiprofile. So now if user chooses certain multiprofile only choose/assigned fields are displayed (and it doesn't matter that he/she entered some values to fields that ware displayed before as default profile). Data stored in database stays untouched.

So answering to your questions:

1. No, users will not loose previously entered data as no field is changed or cleared. Multiprofile uses the same fields but displays only assigned.

2. Yes, once stored data will be carried to multiprofile fields... as they are the same fields (if you use already created ones)

3. No, all is up to user. You can set a "default" profile type.

4. User points are not related wit multiprofiles.

5. No, only to other existing multiprofile. Once you create multiprofile, "default" profile is not available anymore (not available to select it. members that didn't choose multiprofile yet are still with "default" profile. Once they choose a multiprofile, they can't roll back to "default" one).

Thank you Michal for clearing that up, So in effect I would have to encourage all users to select either personal or professional, to get them off default. I cannot shift all users initially over to say personal as a default profile?

Hi, Anthony.

You can do it one by one via administration panel: Backend -> Components -> JomSocial -> Monitor -> Members -> Edit certain member and in tab Account details you can change profile (field second from bottom). Note that when you change profile like that and save, in tab "basic information" (depends what you called your fields group) you'll see only fields that are assigned to certain multiprofile... and they will contain previous data :)

Try on a test user first ;)