Add description text under input field for new profile fields

Question

Based on information gathered HERE and HERE; I was able to put something together.

First… abandon your first approach. It will add a field value, yes. But it will not allow you to add a descriptive field.

Instead, we need to create an entire new table tag in the structure that gets populated from WordPress. To do so, let’s use this function:

function my_custom_user_profile_fields( $user ) {
    ?>
    <table id="facebook_user_field_table" class="form-table">
        <tr id="facebook_user_field_row">
            <th>
                <label for="facebook_field"><?php _e('Facebook URL', 'your_textdomain'); ?></label>
            </th>
            <td>
                <input type="text" name="facebook_field" id="facebook_field" value="<?php echo esc_attr( get_the_author_meta( 'facebook_field', $user->ID ) ); ?>" class="regular-text" /><br />
                <span class="description"><?php _e('Please enter your Facebook profile url.', 'your_textdomain'); ?></span>
            </td>
        </tr>
    </table>
<?php 
}
add_action( 'show_user_profile', 'my_custom_user_profile_fields' );
add_action( 'edit_user_profile', 'my_custom_user_profile_fields' );

That will define our new tr element, and populate it with the necessary structure. You may change the field label and description to suit your needs.

NOTE: This will only create our new tr element, and place it at the bottom of the “About Yourself” section. In order to ‘place’ the new tr element where we want (ie the “Contact Info”), we have to use a bit of jQuery:

function my_facebook_field_placement_js() {
    $screen = get_current_screen();
    if ( $screen->id != "profile" && $screen->id != "user-edit" ) 
    return;
    ?>
    <script type="text/javascript">
        jQuery(document).ready(function($) {
            field = $('#facebook_user_field_row').remove();
            parent = $('#url').closest('tr');
            field.insertBefore(parent);
        });
    </script>
<?php
}
add_action( 'admin_head', 'my_facebook_field_placement_js' );

This code will take our new tr element, and add it BEFORE the “WEBSITE” field that is generated by WordPress.

NOTE: See how we are hooking to admin_head here? We want to make sure this doesn’t run on every admin page. So, the first part of this code block will check the current page, and only run the code if we are on the profile page.

Now… that’s great. Placement is Perfect!! But wait… now our data is not saving when we update the fields. Fret not!! We have another hook for that:

function my_save_custom_user_profile_fields( $user_id ) {
    if ( !current_user_can( 'edit_user', $user_id ) )
        return FALSE;

    update_user_meta( $user_id, 'facebook_field', $_POST['facebook_field'] );
}
add_action( 'personal_options_update', 'my_save_custom_user_profile_fields' );
add_action( 'edit_user_profile_update', 'my_save_custom_user_profile_fields' );

This will update the field, and store it in the user meta table. Then, whenever you need to access this value from your template; just use the get_user_meta function.

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