I installed Joomla 1.7 and I noticed that you can have user profiles with the user profile plugin. However, is there a way to publicly access a user's profile (without loging in)?
For instance, I noticed that you can go to:
/index.php?option=com_users&view=profile
However, that seems to pull up my own profile, If I am logged out it always redirects you to the login form. I have tried adding additional variables like "id=1", "user_id=1", or "userId=1".
Is there a way to do this? Or will I have to develop a component to pull in this information publicly?
Even though it not possible with clean Joomla website a lot of useful code come with it, which you could include to your component if you prefer to create one.
But... there is a great extension Community Builder with a great team behind it. Having used it in the past, I would highly recommend it as a solution for community based sites.
It changes the login form to a much better & bug-free form, enables more fields to be created for registration, and allows special pages for individual users, plus, community builder has extension-specific plugins.
EDIT: This answer needs an update as since it was added more extensions have been introduced like JomSocial or EasySocial. I cannot recomment CommunityBuilder any more