Don’t get me wrong, I love Expression Engine but sometimes you just come up against a brick wall and the only solution is to either pay someone to write a very clever extension or hack the system files about yourself (not for the faint hearted!).

During a recent project I needed to implement some basic member functionality and add some custom profile fields for the member accounts. No problem, Expression Engine has this covered. But (You knew there was going to be a but) it only provides support for text input, text area and select field types. Boo!

I ‘needed’ to be able to present users with a greater variety of input types such as checkboxes and radio buttons.

So, with a little help from the fanatical EllisLab staff I set about ‘hacking’ that very feature into the product.

I’ve documented the steps that I took in a Wiki article on the Expression Engine website. :)

For further discussion on this topic please also see the related Expression Engine discussion forum thread.