I do not know anything about s2member but it does appear to me from the outside that you might have too many profiles! What with WordPress, BuddyPress, Simple:Press and now s2member! is it not possible to focus on one of them and just deal with how to get the data into and out of that?

I was just about to post the same. The thing is that s2member allows (or should I say forces?) capturing custom fields at registration. We’re teaching blogging classes so the idea was to capture the student’s Blog URL at registration. Inexplicably s2member refuses to use the standard blog_url field for that hence a custom field is needed. Having to do that we then also thought of capturing a Blog category upfront (drop-down), to be used on a blogroll for easy filtering.

Since this turned into to much of a headache I’ve decided to NOT use s2member custom fields and also NOT use the s2member profile and even disable access to the WP profile. Leaves BuddyPress and Simple:Press.

BuddyPress is used for all the social interactions in class. Its profile matches the overall look of the class. But, of course, it also doesn’t pull in any standard WP fields (right, here we go again). One has to use custom fields. It is also not easy to remove BP’s edit profile link in the topbar (needs extra filters/functions to do that) so this one’s always quite visible since all social interactions happen there as well.

Now if we could sync BP and SP on desired fields, that would be great (like URL). And I certainly don’t mind creating all current and future custom fields in SP if they can be pushed to BP as well. I do very much prefer to work with just one main option.

I will have to defer to Steve to answer that one in any depth as he created our BuddyPress integration plugin and has been working through many of the issues with profile data. He will be along later.

again, too many profiles…

with the buddypress plugin we have added a bunch of stuff to the user profile, but its the profile a user edits… not the forward facing profile…  So we took a lot of stuff from the sp profile that can be set, like options, and added it to the profile, so you can configure you sp look and feel form the bp profile…

we have not added anything to the publicly available profile page…  we do have a ticket open to add some info to that profile too… its just not in the initial release…

I see, just had a look at the structure myself. Well, I’ll keep it down to BP and SP profiles going forward. Can’t reduce it any further for various reasons (especially since our class site is getting quite complex and I need to keep some things in their own ‘box’). If the SP buddypress plugin would eventually have options to push profile fields (including SP custom fields) over to BP, that would be great.

In any case, thanks so much for the excellent support, much appreciated.

at this point, can really say which fields we may support since its work for any of them…

its too bad BP also stores its profile info in custom tables vs the standard wp method… we could all share otherwise…

Absolutely agree. BP is a great plugin, especially for our environment as it offers excellent in-class communication features. But the whole separate table thing and no option of pulling standard WP fields is major pain in the rear.

All said and done I’ve come up with a different solution. My response to s2member is over here: http://www.s2member.com/forums/topic/syncing-custom-field-with-standard-field/#post-58783. I’ve used User Profiles Made Easy and created a nicely styled frontend profile (a plugin I found after hours upon hours of dead end research and forum reading). It’s quite fantastic actually. UPME not only creates a nicely styled, user editable frontend profile complete with custom fields but, lo and behold, can pull any custom fields from any other plugin – as long as they’re stored in usermeta (<exclude BP>). So I created a ‘Blog Category’ custom field in Simple:Press and pulled it onto the UPME profile with a simple click. Quite elegant actually.

That sounds great. I will try and remember that so as to be able to recommend it in future.