Safecracker Registration, Low Search, and Member Fields

Question

I'm using Safecracker Registration so I can leverage Channels for Member fields. Since EE's Member already have certain fields, should I use those whenever I can instead of defining them as Channel fields? For example, there is a "bio" field in the Member fields. Should I use that or should I define that as a field in my Channel?

I need to implement a search feature and am planning to use Low Search. I will end up having to search these fields whether they exist in the native Member fields or in my Channel. Given this search requirement, which route should I take regarding these Member fields? Use EE's native Member fields or put them in my Channel?

Answer 1

I would suggest you to have all the member fields into channel and manage so that EE's default member module would have only required account details fields like (username, password, email, screen name). It would facilitate you following:

• Easy to populate member data at front end.
• In the CP, you can see all the member data within the channel entries.
• Easy to implement search feature on member's channel entries
• In the CP, the filtration of members in EE's member module is limited where channel entries filtration is much better.

There are some other benefits also which you can see :) .