Add visibility and required controls to the WordPress profile fields

[shawfactor]

The new WordPress profile fields are great and are really helpful in the project I am involved in which involves extending buddypress to Multisite.and I’ve already extended them slightly in a plugin I’m working on

But they are lacking two key features namely the ability to change visibility and also toggle if they are required or not. This should be easy enough to add I imagine. And would really improve their usability…

[imath]

I disagree:

1. these fields are not required in WordPress
2. visibility would probably be a pain to manage as these information can be used by some themes to display info in comments, post author vcard, etc...

I'd like to see a patch or detailed arguments shared by more than one people to prove I'm wrong. For now I'll close this ticket.

[shawfactor]

Re point 2Yes but so what? The same can be said of xprofile fields (I can display echo them in my theme).

Im really only concerned with ensuring they appear in the user profile and sign up forms. Yea I could create an xprofile field of first_name etc but this would violate DRY principles and would not be useful in the environment I run in which every site in the Multisite has separate xprofile tables.