Lesson 36. Customers — Profile Fields

Profile fields in CS-Cart ecommerce shopping cart system are located at Administration → Profile fields. Profile fields contain various information about a user. All profile fields belong to two sections — Contact information, Billing Address/Shipping Address. Online shop solution users can fill in those fields when registering an account, in their profile, or at checkout. Some fields can be made mandatory.

On the profile fields page you can add new fields and edit existing ones. To add a new field click the Plus button. Profile field settings require some explanation. So, let’s go slowly, one by one.

Description is actually a name of a new field as it appears on the storefront on in the admin panel.

Field name is the character sequence unique for each profile field in the shopping cart software. It serves to identify the field and can be used as a variable in the document editor. So, it’s actually not a name but rather an identifier.

Position — the position of this profile field on the list relative to other fields. The type of the profile field. It determines what kind of values can be entered or selected in the field. If you choose Radio group or Multiple checkboxes, you’ll have to specify the possible variants on the Variants tab. Be aware that once you create a profile field, you won’t be able to change its type.

Section determines whether this field is a part of user’s contact information or billing/shipping address.

User-defined CSS class allows you to assign a custom CSS class to this field. So, what are all these fields used for you may ask? Simply speaking these field a new customer fills with personal information when going through the registration procedure of filling up his or her profile. The field are also presented during checkout. There is also an option that makes field mandatory. Consider to use this ability at checkout fields.

But there is more. Recently we added profile fields support into our new document editor. That’s how it works. If a profile field appears at checkout, its identifier from the Field name property will also appear in the document editor among other variables. The field can be found in the User group of variables. Simply click on the field name, and it will be added to the place where you last left the cursor in the document template.

To finish this overview we would like to warn you that deleting a profile field will also delete the data that users entered in that profile field earlier. If you don’t want that, just hide the profile field for all php shopping cart users.