sign up user profile

Looking for feedback on what others have done to accomplish the following. On sign up, instead of just username, password, and e-mail - how have you tackled gathering more information? I'd like add custom fields - full name, website, etc etc. What's your recipie?

Moreover, the hot topic, building user profiles. The ability to build out a "view" to see a user's infomration and links to all the supplied content of a site (i.e. images, posts, blogs, etc)