URL with user name in Joomla 3.3

Question

I am looking for solution to show the url with username. I am using Joomla 3.3.0 stable version.

Ex. site_url/userp-username

I tried to solve this using .htaccess with following rules that I have used for my core PHP websites.

RewriteRule ^userp-([a-zA-Z0-9-_]+)/?$ site_url/index.php?option ... er_name=$1 [R=301,L]

When I hit the url for example http://sitename.com/userp-vishal07 it execute the code that I want to call for this url and it shows the results correctly. But url does not remain as it is and turn into http://vicciivital.com/index.php/en/component/users/profile?layout=view_profile&user_name=vishal07

I am not able to understand how the Joomla redirect works. Please correct me if I am doing any mistakes here.

Answer 1

For reasons I have never understood the com_users router does not route any profiles except the users own profile.

/**
 * Method to get a route configuration for the profile view.
 *
 * @return  mixed   Integer menu id on success, null on failure.
 * @since   1.6
 */
public static function getProfileRoute()
{
    // Get the items.
    $items  = self::getItems();
    $itemid = null;

    // Search for a suitable menu id.
    //Menu link can only go to users own profile.

    foreach ($items as $item)
    {
        if (isset($item->query['view']) && $item->query['view'] === 'profile')
        {
            $itemid = $item->id;
            break;
        }

    }
    return $itemid;
}

What you would need to do is extend this method to handle everyone's profiles. Just make sure to deal with the situation that there is a content item or tag with the same alias as the alias for the user.

In general the easiest workaround is to use com_contact as a profile instead. Turning on the contact creator plugin will create contacts for your new users automatically and contact can display anything from a profile plugin. Also it can display articles by the user and then you can also add plugins for other things if you want. To me it always works a lot better then messing with the com_users profile.