Adding a file upload field to user profile form - Drupal 6

Even though many are using Drupal 7 now I recently had to come up with a way to add a custom file upload field to a user profile form. Though content profile would be the preferred way to do this the client needed to keep using the core profile module. hook_form_alter was the obvious route to go. Here is what I did:

Basically you can base the code off the picture upload in user.module and create a custom module for your form_alter:

Since I started doing dynamic PHP development I've been using the trusty mysql_* functions that PHP provides. These have worked great for me throughout the years but I've been on a kick to make my programs a bit more secure. I've long since verified data input but it still didn't seem to be good enough.

In trying to keep the amount of new views created on the site I'm working on I wanted to programmitcally change certain portions of a view to use the same output but different inputs. In background I'm using Drupal 6 with Views 2 API.

Specifically I wanted to change the number of items and node type filter. Though this could be expanded to changing the sort, arguments or fields returned as well.