Profile Customizer is a premium non-free plugin that was created from the comparison of the user profile pages in Q2A with the user profile pages of StackOverflow. I usually try to compare them because, as everybody knows, SO is the most popular and mature QA site around and, our beloved Q2A, can learn and benefit from that. Now, I might not understand why SO is so popular but regardless of the reason, as long as SO is ahead of Q2A, I guess getting a step closer to it will always be a step in the right direction.
So coming back to Q2A, this plugin tries to provide the data needed to display some currently missing user information in the Q2A profile. The key features are:
- Display a reputation graph
- Shows the points and the events that generated point changes
- Allows hiding votes given to other users
- Allows customizing amount of days to display
- Provides RTL support
- Display when the user was last seen, i.e., when the user has last accessed the site
- Display the amount of total visits to the site and the latest consecutive ones
- Display a field with the total profile views the user has received
- Display the amount of helpful flags the user has submitted
- Automatically assign points for helpful flags
- Display a field with the age of the user, taken from a customizable field in the account section
- Any user is able to add a custom donation link to their profile
- Ability to hide fields of the profile and account sections (e.g.: hiding the Type or Extra privileges fields)
- Admin can reorder the sections in the user profile (Profile information, Activity, Wall and the Points Chart section)
- Full internationalization support: Every piece of text the plugin uses can be customized. Spanish translation included
- CSS customization of the delete as helpful button and image: It is possible to change the button so that it looks similar to the other action buttons. A separate CSS file is provided to do so with a sample image
- Almost all HTML is output by means of a simple template system
A picture is worth a thousand words. So if you’ve ever used SO you’ll find most of these fields familiar:
The most remarkable feature of the plugin is the reputation graph. It keeps track of all reputation changes and display them day by day. When clicking on any day a tooltip containing the detail of the events that happened on that day is displayed:
It is important to note that this plugin displays point changes generated by all of my plugins.
You will also note that some fields have been added and removed from the profile section. In the example you can see that the wordy Extra privileges and the Type fields have been removed. The Say thanks field is a new field that allows each user to add a link to a payment system (such as PayPal) to be used as a donation for their support. Also the chart is on top of the Activity section and the Wall section has been hidden.
Regarding the helpful flags feature, the idea is that the admin is able to delete posts in a particular way that would increase the helpful flags counter for any flagging user. Doing so would result in a point increment, which can be configured in the plugin settings. This is what the delete as helpful button looks like:
This additional button is also present in the admin/hidden section when listing posts. Note I’m using a screenshot from the old Snow theme as the flag count is clearer than in SnowFlat.