Profile

On your website, profiles give you a way to keep information about a person in a centralized place. For example, you may want to list your department contacts and their photo, email, and title so people can contact them. Instead of doing this in the content area of a standard content page, use a profile for that person to keep this information neat and tidy. When you do this, you can include the same information in multiple places on the website, such as a directory and an individual profile page, but just edit the data for the person in one place. For example, if someone in your department gets a promotion, instead of editing a directory page, their personal page, and a page that lists their department, you would just edit their profile, and the title would update in all three places automatically. This makes content management much easier for you and reduces the risk that you forget to update an important piece of information about a person in your website.

We use the BU Profiles plugin for all profiles on WordPress. There are also some external services in the university that provide profile-like functionality, such as profiles.bu.edu for the medical campus, and MyCV for faculty. These external services do not currently integrate with the BU Profiles plugin without custom development work. A centralized solution for profiles is on the road map to be addressed, but, as of this time, we do not know what the timeline or solution for this will be. We do expect that this centralized solution will integrate with the BU Profiles plugin and currently recommend all profile-like data to be entered in BU Profiles for the time being for maximum future compatibility.