Customizing the User Profile Layout in Drupal

As Drupal becomes more popular and grows its open-source development community, more websites are turning to it as a solution for creating extremely powerful online communities, allowing users to submit their own content to a community hub. The power of these hubs is obviously their users and creating an organized, easy to use interface can be the difference between failure and success.

I must say that Drupal’s out-of-the-box layout of content on pages is not one of its strengths, but the ability to override the default User Profile layout by adding a custom user-profile.tpl.php file to your active theme folder is easy enough to do and can make a very positive impact by reducing clutter and organizing data.

Once the custom user-profile.tpl.php file is added to your active theme folder, Drupal will automatically detect the presence of your custom user-profile.tpl.php and override the default user profile layout. To make this happen, you need to rebuild the theme registry, which you can do by clearing the caches (for example using the button on the admin/settings/performance page), or simply by visiting the admin/build/modules page. You can then customize, modify and style profile layouts to suit your needs and provide your target audience with a more functional and better organized user experience.

Need help? There are great resources including http://drupal.org/node/35728 which provide step-by-step instructions for creating and extending User Profile layouts.