User profile urls in CraftCMS

Unlike Entries and Categories, Users don't have a URI Format setting. This means {{ user.getUrl() }} method returns a blank string. Here's how to fix that in CraftCMS v4.3.0.

CraftCMS entries (and categories) have a setting called URI Format. This allows you to easily call {{ entry.getUrl() }} in your templates.

Users do not have this setting which requires developers to add custom url code in their templates. Usually something like:

{{ url("users/"~user.username) }}

This is fine but it's not ideal. It's also not very flexible. What if you want to change the url format? You'll need to update all your templates.

Adding a .url() method to Users #

First thing you might try is adding a custom behaviour to Users with a getUrl() method. Unfortunately this won't work because User is an Element and Element's already have a getUrl() method which can't be overwritten in a Behaviour.

Looking at the Element::getUrl() (committed on Oct 21, 2022) method we can see there is a User::EVENT_DEFINE_URL event that is fired before the url is returned. We can use this to add our own logic.

Create a module #

Step 1: Follow the instructions on the CraftCMS website to create a custom module.

Step 2: Add the following code to your module's init() method:

<?php
namespace foo;

use Craft;

class Module extends \yii\base\Module
{
    public function init()
    {
        // ...

        // Defer most setup tasks until Craft is fully initialized:
        Craft::$app->onInit(function() {
            // Add the event listener
             \craft\base\Event::on(
                User::class, 
                Element::EVENT_DEFINE_URL, 
                function (DefineUrlEvent $event) {
                    $event->handled = true;
                    // Add your custom url logic here
                    $event->url = UrlHelper::siteUrl('users/' . $event->sender->id);
                    // Other examples:
                    // $event->url = UrlHelper::siteUrl('users/' . $event->sender->username);
                    // $event->url = UrlHelper::siteUrl('users/' . $event->sender->uuid);
                }
            );
        });
    }
}

Step 3: Test it out by adding the following to your template:

{{ user.getUrl() }}