This tutorial will show you how to import your user profiles into FCChat.

In FCChat, each user is automatically given a default profile page; however, this profile is not linked to or integrated with any external source.

If you have integrated your pre-existing user accounts with the chat. (See the User Guide’s section on account integration), you may wish to link your user’s pre-existing profiles as well.

In order to do this, you must edit the field import_profiles in the FCChat configuration.

You will enter into the import_profiles field the url of the page that will generate the profile. The URL needs to be constructed in such a way so that the user’s name can be appended to it. The page will take the user’s name and output the user’s profile accordingly.

Once you have done this, the chat will no longer use the default profile pages. Instead, when you click on profile, in the user’s dialog box, you will be taken to the page you specified in the import_profiles field.

For example, PHPBB profile pages can accept the user’s name as a parameter in the querystring, so in order to link your chat users to their PHPBB profiles, you would set import_profiles to
http://MYPHPBBFORUM/memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&un=.

Of course, you would replace MYPHPBBFORUM with the path to your forum. When the profile is fetched, FCChat will automatically append the user’s name to the end of the URL, so that the “un=” part will become “un=USERNAME”, where USERNAME is the name of the particular user.

Unlike PHPBB (unfortunately), many systems do not have a default means of obtaining the profile directly from the user’s name. In this case you must create a script which will accomplish this task.

You will create the script so that it can accept the user’s name (in the querystring, for instance). Then, using that information, it will output the profile, or perhaps redirect to the profile page. The exact code required to write the script is system specific and outside the scope of this tutorial.

Place the script on your site, and link to it using the import_profiles field. Again, keep in mind, when setting up the URL to your script, that FCChat will append to this URL the user’s name.

{“topic”:”Importing user profiles”}