Happy New Year to everyone!

Well, I wasn't really sure what to blog about so I thought I'd mention some of my recent activity on an extension I'm building for a project that controls the display of a CB profile.   One of the requirements we have is the need to differentiate between profile types.   Each type requires different layouts (more than what CB offers today), conditional display of CB plugin content based on type, as well as different fields that are required upon registration.    After looking to see if there was anything available, I didn't find anything that was able to satisfy my needs.  I did find one component that looked to be exactly what I'd need but it was encrypted and would require a 3rd party component to be intalled to run the encrypted code.  So I figured I'd write something myself and see how it evolves.

The first part was to figure out how to display different CB fields on the registration page based on the profile type.  That didn't take long and quickly built that mambot.  That was the easy part.  The hardest part was how to enable an unlimited number of profile display styles that is driven by the user's profile type WITHOUT hacking the core CB code.  The less invasive code the better.  Well ... after thinking on this for a while, I finally figured out how to do it.

Now I have a working example (on my local boxes) where I can map a specific CB plugin (and its output) to a given tag that can then be used within an HTML document.  I'm using patTemplate templating engine as I do within GMaps.   I can then create templates with these tags, placed in different locations based on the template and profile type, that users can select from (again based on their type).  

I am starting to think that I need to update my league management extension to focus around profiles that I can then create different types for teams, a league, an organization or for that matter, even a player.  I think the possibilities are endless to be honest.  

Oh well ... I'm rambling on.    That all said, and after my intial coding, the guys from Joomlapolis will probably build the same thing and all of this would be for not.  However, in the end, it has been interesting to look under the covers at the CB code.  I always welcome the opportunity to learn something new.

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