The tweet that prompted this blog post:

Portal confession: I always took the Profile page as ‘special’ and accepted its lack of customisation like a known limitation. Today I had a brainwave and replaced it within 5 minutes with basic config. I’ve wasted 10’s of hours on workarounds for previous projects

Like me, you may have banged your head against the wall failing to customise the out-of-the-box Profile page. Turns out you can bypass it all together. While making another customisation to the Header template, I noticed the Sign In drop-down menu that contains the Profile link uses a Web Link Set called Profile Navigation (this contains just one web link, pointing to the out-of-the-box Profile page)

So, all we need to do is create another web page and point the web link to this page. Took all of about 5 minutes… I’m now trying to forget the 10s of hours wasted trying to work around the assumed limitation. Doh!…

Lesson (re)learnt: there’s a lot to learn from the out-of-the-box web templates if we just take the time!

Here’s the necessary configuration

Create an Basic Form with the following values

Note – In this example, I’m using the same model-driven form as the out-of-the-box Profile page. Feel free to use any form on the contact table, or any content you wish. Maybe your requirement would be to use the same form but make it read only. I’ve often been asked to replace the Organization Name text field with a read-only version of the Company Name lookup field

Create a Web Page for your customised version of the Profile page. Set the Table Form lookup to the Edit Profile form you just created

To make things obvious in the screenshots, I’ve called mine Profile Custom

Go to Web Link Sets and search for Profile Navigation and open the Links tab

Open the Web Link called Profile

Edit the Page lookup field to point to your new Profile page

Go to Site Markers and search for Profile

In the Web Page field, select your new custom Profile page

Refresh the Cache (as in the awesome portal podcast of the same name)

Results

Open the Sign In / username drop-down and you’ll see that the Profile link points to your new page

If your portal uses the default behaviour of redirecting to the Profile page upon logging in, it should now point to your custom profile page instead (thanks to the Site Marker you created – this essentially says to the portal “whenever we refer to the Profile page, this is the one we mean”)

Note – The purpose of even looking into this was for a Portal Web API tutorial I had in mind, allowing users an easy means to upload a profile photo. Click here to learn how 🙂