Your profile is where you can store personal information about yourself. This information can be private, public or shared with any of your defined access groups (more on groups later).

Why would you want to have a profile?

Your profile serves two purposes:

• It tells others a little bit about you
• The system automatically creates links from your profile to others who share the same interests, likes, dislikes, goals and skills!

myIchthus not only creates links to other people but also to resources - this helps you find information which could assist with your studies and research!

Profile information includes likes, dislikes, skills etc. (NB: we strongly recommend you do not make your email address or home address public.)

Once you enter information into the various fields (make sure each item you put in is comma separated), the system will automatically create tags which allow you to see anyone else who has an interest, like, dislike or skill that matches yours. This is great for finding others with similar interests.

Filling in your profile

• Select 'Your Profile' from the main menu options

Now select 'Edit this profile'

• You will see a selection of fields

Each field has a title (for example: 'Who am I?'), a text area, and an access level option

• Fill in the information that you want to share with others, such as who you are, what city you live in, what your likes and dislikes are.
• Beside each field you will see an option titled “Access level”, with dropdown list of three choices: Public, Logged in users, Private. This setting controls who can see your profile items. For example, if you don't want anyone to see your address, set the 'Access Restriction' to Private. (You can also create your own access levels by going to 'Your Network' - 'Access controls')'
• Access levels are also linked to the access controls function.

Any fields you leave blank will not show on your profile page.

Note: The profile field 'Brief description' is used to populate your sidebar profile.

When you're finished, press the 'Save your profile' button at the bottom of the page.

Importing your profile from another application

myIchthus supports the FOAF standard for sharing profile and network information. If you already have profile information entered in another application which also supports FOAF, you can use it to populate Elgg's profile fields:

• Export the FOAF file from the external application and save it to your computer. * On the 'Edit this profile' screen, click the 'Browse…' button in the 'Upload a FOAF file' section, and find the saved file on your computer.
• Click the 'Upload' button to transfer the FOAF file to Elgg.