Chapter 8: Customizing User Data

After learning how to customize the post editor and taxonomies with custom data fields, the next areas that we will be augmenting are the user creation and editing sections of WordPress. This type of modification can be used for many different purposes, including tracking when users have last visited a site or storing additional data on the types of services they are interested in. This chapter expands on the private content plugin that we started in the Creating a new enclosing shortcode recipe in Chapter 2, Plugin Framework Basics, and the Storing stylesheet data in user settings recipe in Chapter 3, User Settings and Administration Pages. This time around, we are adding a second level of content protection that will restrict specially identified post or page content to only be displayed for paid users.

This chapter shows us how to augment the WordPress user editor and use the additional data associated with user accounts through the following...