I hope this is the place for this. It may be more suited to module development, but it's about use, I think, not development.
Anyhow, I'm probably missing something really easy, but I've done an extensive trawl of what documentation I can find and can't get any clues.
I have implemented usernode + nodeprofile (and registerprofile). On sign-up a user is presented with the user form asking for a username and email and under that the one content type I have designated as a nodeprofile. Now, this all works pretty well at the moment, but there's a lot of work for me to do theming various pages, so before I go too far down that route I want to just check - can I now reference these nodeprofile fields as if they were user fields?
For example, I want my users (an alumni assoicaiton) to be able to add little snippets of news (a CCK type) both about themselves, the default, or about another alumnus who is not registered on the site, say. And I want the titles of these news snippets to be consistent - with forename, surname, house and cohort. So I want to compute a field to create a default title, consisting of these fields from the nodeprofile content type for the user that's logged in and creating the news snippet.
Also I'd like the AuthorInfo module to pick up a computed field on the nodeprofile content type. Is that possible? If so I suspect I'm getting the "Real Name" field wrong.