Avatars and custom profile fields

I’m trying to add the option for users to upload their own avatars via the front end of the site. I also want the ability to show/hide/add profile page fields (such as title and credentials).

So far I’ve gotten the user avatar plugin to allow uploads of plugins from the backend (but not front end).

I also managed to get the Cimy User Extra Fields Plugin to allow me to add “title” and “credential” fields to the profile and registration pages (and hide what I want to stay hidden. However, this does not translate over to my bbPress plugin.

I found that the bbpress template page: form-user-edit.php is the page that contains the front-end user profile edit form. The extra fields I have set up through Cimy do not show up here and I haven’t managed to figure out how to get it so they do. I can put the form elements in, but not sure how to hook them to the correct functions/fields.

The first name field looks like this:

<label for="first_name"><?php _e( 'First Name', 'bbpress' ) ?></label>
<input type="text" name="first_name" id="first_name" value="<?php echo esc_attr( bbp_get_displayed_user_field( 'first_name' ) ); ?>" class="regular-text" />

I tried copying this over as:

<label for="title"><?php _e( 'Title', 'bbpress' ) ?></label>
<input type="text" name="title" id="title" value="<?php echo esc_attr( bbp_get_displayed_user_field( 'title' ) ); ?>" class="regular-text" />

But as you can imagine, since the fields are not in bbpress, nothing happened. I’m not sure what to change to get it to display/edit my extra fields.

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I’m not sure why it’s so difficult to customize the profile page, or why the bbpress plugin doesn’t populate fields based on the wp users. Any help people can give me would be great though.

If there’s an easier way to be doing this, that would be even better.

Thanks