While user accounts are a requirement for the system to work, user profiles are a must for your community to work. A user profile allows your users to share all sorts of details about themselves. It should be very flexible so that you can easily extend the capabilities of your users' profiles as your community matures and morphs over time.

In this chapter we will discuss the basics of setting up a user profile. This will include collecting various personal tidbits about your users, some contact information, and so on. We will also go over the concept of allowing your users to upload an avatar (an icon or image associated with a user's profile) as well as integrating with a third-party avatar service, Gravatar. Part of the uploading of a custom avatar will take us into some image manipulation so that all avatars are of equal size and shape on our site!

With this out of the way we can move on to putting the users' public profile together and discuss how that profile...