Customising the contact/user system

By Mark Nielsen on 10 Mar 2007 at 21:09 UTC

Question 1: Is it possible to make the email field for a user non-compulsory? (I'm suspecting not, but thought I'd check)

The reason I'd like to do this crazy thing is that I'd like to create a contact directory for my organisation - and some individuals do not have email addresses.

Also, part of my organisation's work involves letting school kids post to the website. Not all of them have email either, and for child protection reasons it would be better if there was no specific info about them stored in the website.

Question 2: Is it possible to have roles-based access to contact fields?

The reason for this is that some individuals who need listing in our contact directory will not want all of their details displaying to everybody.

I'm suspecting that I'll need to create my own module to do the stuff I'm after. But, as I'm new to Drupal, I thought I'd ask for quick opinions as to how the existing infrastructure might be coaxed to handle these things.

Thanks for your attention :)

Comments

I don't know the answer to

gonzocoder commented 10 March 2007 at 21:38

I don't know the answer to your first question :-(

But regarding the second question: You could use CCK, with Node Profile to create the users profile as a node, and then CCK Field Permissions to limit who can view what.

Thanks, Gonzo

Mark Nielsen commented 11 March 2007 at 07:16

Thanks - looks like there's some potential there :) I'll look into those.

Start by looking at Profile

nancydru

she/her/hers

English

Boston

commented 11 March 2007 at 01:41

Let's start with the easy way first. Look at Profile and adding fields. It may be that the protection there is enough for you. If not, then look at other methods.

As for not having an email address, how are you going to contact them? It's easy to add a phone number to the profile. It's a bit harder to give them a user id on your site without an email address, unless you fake one.

Nancy W.
now running 5 sites on Drupal so far
Drupal Cookbook (for New Drupallers)
Adding Hidden Design or How To notes in Your Database

NancyDru

It's odd, but still important

Mark Nielsen commented 11 March 2007 at 07:38

As things stand, faking an email address is exactly what I've done - for the kids, anyway. The email addresses we've used are just aliases we've set up for a catch-all mailbox.

That's do-able for the kids, because it's a specific project and there aren't very many. But for the organisational directory it's going to be to awkward to do this.

Longer term, we want to use Drupal for an organisational directory of individuals and organisations. We could well end up using the book module for this - I've recently used the book module for the R.C Diocese of Plymouth's directory (http://www.plymouth-diocese.org.uk/?q=dir) - but the downside is you end up putting in repetitive information for each entry and it stops behaving like a database. The plus side of the book module, is it enables the organisation to get a dump of the directory for including in print publications.

--
As an aside, there are some sites that operate user accounts without email addresses. Runescape is one example. To handle this, we'd have to implement a security-question-based system for password recovery?