Standard way of creating profile pages with custom content for each user?

Question

I'm in need of a solution that I need a profile page (accessible to only admin and that user) with custom content (i.e. different content for different users), for each new user I've registered. Many ideas are coming in my mind like making a textarea for each user in the admin's WP dashboard and then displaying the textarea's content to the respective users profile page.

I'm a WordPress programmer, and I'll come up with a solution of this problem in a way or other. However, I would like to listen which is the recommended and most standardized way of doing this.

Any sort of workaround is welcome. However, standardized will be preferred.

Answer 1

I think your idea is good: create a function that hook 'show_user_profile' and 'edit_user_profile' action. In this function use a conditional to show a textarea only for admins and the content of this textarea (saved as user meta) to the owner of the profile.

Something like (very rough and untested):

function custom_profile_content ( $user ) {
  if ( current_user_can('edit_users') ) {
    echo '<table class="form-table">';
    $now = get_user_meta( $user->ID, 'custom_user_content', true ) ? : "";
    printf( '<tr><th><label for="custom_user_content">%s</label></th>', esc_html__('Custom User Content', 'yourtextdomain') );
    printf('<td><textarea name="custom_user_content" id="custom_user_content" rows="4" class="large-text" />%s</textarea></td></tr>', esc_textarea($now) );
    echo '</table>';
  } elseif( $user->ID == wp_get_current_user()->ID ) {
    echo '<h3>' . __('Hi, there', 'yourtextdomain') . '</h3>';
    echo '<p>' . $now . '</p>';
  }
}

function custom_profile_content_save ( $user_id ) {
  if ( isset($_POST['custom_user_content']) ) update_user_meta( $user_id, 'custom_user_content', $_POST['custom_user_content'] );
}


add_action( 'show_user_profile', 'custom_profile_content' );
add_action( 'edit_user_profile', 'custom_profile_content' );
add_action( 'personal_options_update', 'custom_profile_content_save' );
add_action( 'edit_user_profile_update', 'custom_profile_content_save' );