How to add "User Autobiographies" to account pages???

banjerluke

In my old phpBB forum I had hacked in a way for my users to enter a multi-line "bio" (i.e., an "About Me") into their user profiles. Now that I'm moving to Vanilla (so glad to be doing so, finally!) I am trying to figure out a (not-too-hacky) way to do this.

I want to have (find/build/help with) an add-on to do this, but I haven't done much Vanilla hacking so I don't even know where to start.

What would be needed, in my estimation:

• The bio to be shown on the user's profile page (say, above "Role History")
• A field in the database to hold the bio (I assume, but maybe I'm wrong...)
• A multi-line editbox on the user's account profile form where they can edit their bio
• Ideally, the same multi-line editbox on the registration page, with the ability to make it a required field (perhaps just a quick mod of this add-on)

Is there anyone out there who can help me? I'm an experienced programmer but I have a hard time wrapping my head around Vanilla (admittedly, it's not like I've had the time to devote to trying too hard).

I am grateful for any help you can give me!

Thanks,
Luke

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Reference:
The addon Applicant Discovery seemed similar to what I want, but that information isn't used once the person is registered. Plus, I'm planning on auto-approving everyone.

This discussion ("Profile Page", #2240) seemed to be kind of on the right track...although I don't want profile page customization in terms of stylesheets or anything. Just a bio. HTML or BBCode support is fine, but by no means necessary.

And yes, I know about custom Name/Value pairs—it's not enough because I need something that's already "set up" as a multi-line field and is consistently named and displayed on profiles. But it might be a start.