I'm wondering if something can be done as far as the information or pictures that can be associated with a user. I'd like to move over a personals site to work within XOOPS completely and to move my high school alumni page into XOOPS. Using the latter as an example, I'd like to get the users to have an option of listing their graduating class. Then I'd want to allow others to search by year of graduation. That is important for persons planning a reunion, obviously. So, when a person registers and then decides to update their information, or when they register, can I have an extra field or extra fields that are customized? How would I do that and allow searches on that field?

Secondly, for security reasons, it is good that a user can indicate whether or not his or her email is available to others. So, I tried out sending an email to someone and it right away opened my email client with their email address filled in and now visible. Granted I have webmaster privilidge but is there a way to have the user get an email that shows up as username@mydomain.com? I want to find a way to allow them to get email without giving out their email address. Surely this could be done more elegantly then opening up the email client and filling in their email. We could use a form and the message would be emailed to them with a from address of userid@mydomain.com The private message isn't too useful if a person isn't informed that they have a message to go check. Granted they might want to indicate that they should be notified but that might slip someones mind or make them think they are going to get spam or various other reasons might incline them to avoid accepting notifications as they occur. My feeling is that if they had a message to check they would want to be notified, even if they selected not to receive such notifications. Ideally people come to the site every day and get the notice that they do or do not have messages, like my box here is telling me that I do have messages. I think I did realize that I had set the notification to only by personal message and thus never was getting messages that someone left a response for me.
Many boards have that feature where the person will get an email that says they have a message waiting.
In summary, can custom fields be added for a user and then a searc based on those fields be done? can a user get an email even if they choose not to reveal their actual email address? The same question applies to the personal messaging. Can they get a notice in their regular email that they check every day saying that they got a message to check? I think after a while people might come to the site more often, maybe?