If you’re looking to add a field to a User Profile in Drupal 7… you’ll be able to do it on the Configuration > People > Account Settings page… there, you should find a “Manage Fields” tab at the top of the overlay (just beside the close button for the overlay). If you don’t see it… that means you don’t have the “Field UI” module enabled. Enable it and you’ll be able to see the tab and add fields to your user profiles to your heart’s content. You may find the same information here, but I wanted to share here to help provide the information locally and provide a snapshot in time difference between using just the Fields API and using the Profile 2 module.

If you have the need to add fields that are “private” and can only be seen by the user and the admin, you may want to consider using the Profile 2 module. This is the primary difference between the two methods of adding fields to a user profile. (Profile 2 can also have multiple profiles associated with a user, for example, a professor and an employee profile)… it seems that both of these approaches use the Drupal 7 entity api… which opens it up for use with tokens (if you install/enable the Entity Tokens module which is part of the Entity API extension module), Rules and Features.

Hope that helps someone else along the way in the Drupal Journey.

Cheers, +A