A profile is a set of information held by a website about a visitor to the site.

Normally a profile record is associated with a user record, but it is possible to have profile record which are not associated with a user record.

Profile records are useful because:

• they allow you to store more information than the locked-down user record will allow.
• they can be updated and viewed using the full range of data handling tools within neatComponents.

Profiles are not a specific neatComponents feature, but a usage of existing features within the system – together with some extra settings which have been included to facilitate this usage.

Basic principles

A Profile is simply a record in a Form. By convention this form is named ‘Profile’, but it can be of any name.

There are two ‘flavors’ of profile: Visitor, and User.

Visitor profile

A Visitor profile is not associated with any particular User account, but contains a field with an email address. Emails sent to that email address can contain a token that allows the recipient to edit their profile without being logged in.

User profile

A User profile is associated with a particular User account, and when the user is logged in they can access their profile record directly.

It is possible to create hybrid User / Visitor profile types, and it is possible to create a Visitor profile which the user can convert into a User profile.