Introduction
Nick had published a 2-series article some time ago in the Joomla Magazine titled:
These articles touch upon the many powerful features included and supported by the CB Delimiter field type.
You can create as many CB Delimiter fields as you want and you can place them in your user profiles.
A CB Delimiter field can contain HTML code that is displayed in user profiles and the delimiter field can grab data from other CB fields and show these values as part of the delimiter field.
This opens the door to hundreds of cool ideas to post personalized content that targets your users and their profile visitors.
To better understand the concept we have compiled the folowing 7 great example use cases that you can certainly adapt to your community or let them inspire you to create your own concepts:
- Showing user ids in your user profiles
- Personalized greeting for people visiting other people's user profiles
- Show a specific YouTube Video on all your user profiles
- Show user selected video on your user profiles
- Targeted advertisements on your user profile pages
- Image badges for your user profiles
- Social networking icons on your user profiles
All code snipplets are included at end of tutorial.
Showing user ids in your user profiles
If you put the following code in a delimiter field (cb_userids):
You will see that when you are logged in on your website and visit a profile of another user, the delimiter field will substitute your user_id for the viewer and the owners profile user_id to formulate a message like:
Personalized greeting for people visiting other user profiles
If you put the following code in a delimiter field (cb_personalizedgreeting):
You will see that when a user with a firstnam Nick visits Kyle's profile they will see a message like:
Show a specific Youtube video on all your user profiles
To show a specific Youtube playlist player on your user profile, you need to basically embed some HTML code in your delimter field.
If you put the following code in a delimiter field (cb_youtube):
You will see that all your user profiles will have a 420x315 YouTube player with the famious "Who's on first routine" by Abbott and Costello.
Show user selected video on your user profiles
But what if we want the user to select which video will appear when people visit his/her user profile?
We can modify the previous code to grab the video code from a CB field. So if the CB field cb_video contains e.g., f7pMYHn-1yA, and our delimiter field is changed to look like:
Then the video of another Abbott and Costello routine "Two Tens for a Five" will showup when visiting this user profile.
Targeted advertisements on your user profile pages
Let us assume that we have a CB Field in our profiles that indicate what type of pet the profile owner has.
For simplicity this CB Field is a single select drop-down field named cb_pet that can take one of the values: dog, cat, bird, or other.
We can use this information in a delimiter field to make specific advertisements appear for specific values of this cb_pet field.
Our delimiter field (cb_petadd) might look like this:
Such a delimiter field will render as in the followimg image on of user profile of someone that owns a cat.
Image badge for your user profiles
You can upload your image badges using your Joomla media manager and then link these images to show them on your user profile pages. You could show a specific image depending on a specific value of a cb field.
To simplify things lets assume we have uploaded 2 images in our root images folder named: manthumb.png and womanthumb.png
We want to show the first image if a user profile gender field (cb_gender) is set to male and the second image if the cb_gender field is set to female.
The delimiter field (cb_genderbadge) in such a case may look like:
When viewing a user's profile someone will see the man symbol or the woman symbol depending on the gender of the profile owner.
Social networking icons on your user profiles
Another nice use case is to have nice social networking images that link to user profile specific social pages.
You can find some nice free social icons on the web and upload these to your website using your Joomla media manager.
Then you can create a delimiter field that links these icons to user specific locations based on CB field values.
Our delimiter field (cb_social) might look something like this:
This delimiter field will render all the icons on every user profile page personalized with the user's social networking addresses.
Conclusion
As you can see the CB Delimiter field concept is very powerful and can be used in many different ways to accomplish many different use cases. You can download the code.txt file containing all 7 code examples here.