The majority of this sounds good to me… a couple of comments…

#5 yes a new capability, especially if its a new admin panel.  I like the current practice of a capability per panel.

#6 why would you not want users to be able to change passwords??  sounds like a bad idea and would vote to discard this one

#10 assume this photo would only be shown in the profile display or form itself?

Since we are going to all this work, we should consider or perhaps could offer an option to have the user profile icon in the topic icon row go to another profile page display vs a popup.  You mention third party profile page, but I would like to see us offer one ourselves.  Personally I would prefer doing a profile page load instead of the current popup.

we should probably revisit the members list too and roll any needed changes into there.  Might be some impact to the manage users admin panel too.

and btw, there is a current, open ticket for adding more hooks.  dont know the number off hand, but is assigned to me but could be used if you add any hooks…

#5: I wasn't originally planning on a whole new panel. I was planning a new 'options' page but, if we adopt most of this stuff then a new panel does become attractive as it wil lalmost certainly need more than one form. So we could go with that.

#6: Happy with that. I think there has been at the most two such requests.

#10: Oh yes.

On the page v popup question I was covering that in pont #8 and intended to mean options between basic popup, a complete page or a third party page.

My intention would be to review the existing popup which is probably fine for a lot of users and the 'members' listing as well as those more peripheral like Buddy list and Permissions – just to bring in consitency with whatever we do.

Two questions: Do you want to ad anything to the list? And.. Would you be able to help out with the custom field 'select' and the new capability (again!)?

I can help out where ever needed…  the custom field select will be tricky, but should be doable…

As to anything to add, yes…  to be more explicit, since I am not sure if we are saying the same thing yet…   I would like an option for links to users profile to got to our own user profile page instead of the popup…  an option instead of it having to be a popup… sounds like you are saying that (plus option for 3rd party page) but wanted to be sure…

Been thinking about the portrait notion. reckon this should just be 'allow the user to place some photos on their profile page'.

the question them becomes – should this really just be links as opposed to uploaded images. My thought is yes.

Well, probably going to contradict myself here, but I would follow the avatar model, which allows uploads. Or at least has a permission to allow uploads. 

Earlier, I said no to signatures, but no re-thinking that and perhaps all three should be uploadable…

I am happy to leave photos stored elsewhere for 4.1 if we open a ticket for future to consider allowing sigs and photos to be uploaded.  you know the request will come.

one nit or perhpas a type but, you said 'place some photos' – plural… do they need more than one?  should be some sort of limit

Yes – I was going to allow for a limit to be set. Of course, if the user is allowed to make uploads via the forum then they culd always use that to upload their pictures but I think for now I will make it a URL field. Like sigs. It should be all or nothing I guess.

Also… you mentioned pther itmes that maybe belong displayed (uneditable) on the profile display. Like rank etc…

Can you give me a list and also methods for ontaining the data?

other “potential” items:

• forum rank

• special rank

• badge

• usergroup memberships

I will have to get you the methods tonight after work…