Create user roles and profiles in Codeigniter using Ion Auth

Question

I'm using Codeigniter with Ion Auth for user management. I'd like to create two different user roles - one for volunteers and one for organizations. I know that I can use Ion Auth's groups for things like access control, but what would be a good way to add fields to the different user types (for instance - the volunteer user will have a 'languages spoken' field while the organization will have a 'mission' field)? Should I extend the Ion Auth class for each new user type and handle CRUD seperately for each type, or use the 'groups' field and the user id to reference the fields in another table? Any insight as to an approach to this common problem?

Answer 1

I had the same problem before, what I ended up doing was building relation tables to handle different groups with different fields. Then I modified the profile() code a bit, to join the additional relation table according to the user's group settings.

I would start off building a relational database.

example:

**volunteers table**
id
user_id
languages

**organizations table**
id
user_id
mission

Then depending on user group, join the table in profile() function.

Hope this helps!

Answer 2

I would recommend just adding all the fields you need into the meta table and only updating the ones you need per user group. If you need multiple groups per user check out Ion Auth v2.