Out of all the modules in Drupal Core, Profile has always seemed me to be the most half-assed. It's clear that something needs to happen to it — using CCK field types at the least, maybe removing profile data from the user object, and, if I had my way, permanently node-ifying users. I haven't poked around Drupal 6 as thoroughly as I ought to, but based upon what I've heard from Phil's writeup and the Lullabot podcast, I may have to wait a bit longer to see meaningful change come to Profile.

So others may find themselves in the situation I did yesterday for a bit longer: trying to embed a profile form somewhere that Profile.module doesn't think it ought to go — for instance, yesterday I needed to let users edit their name and address on their user_profile page, rather than expecting them to mess around with a bunch of tabs and only-vaguely-different categories.

You'd think there'd be a way to call drupal_get_form() to collect your users' addresses and names whereever you might care to. But you'd be wrong, so far as I can tell — profile.module acts as a user.module parasite, accomplishing what it does through hook_user() and the abuse of arg().

But it's very easy to re-wrap Profile's form-generating functions in your own module and then call drupal_get_form() against it. Here's the example that I came up with: