Custom registration process

Posted by blogsh on December 26, 2012 at 10:54am

Hi!

I maintain the site of a small association and want to port it to Drupal. Since I've written the site from scratch using Symfony I'm having a hard time converting all the easy things I could program in several minutes to the concepts of Drupal (although looking back the solution is quite easy often). The problem is that I still have a lack of knowledge about what is possible to do with Drupal and where I have to start.

Right now almost everything is ported except the whole user management stuff. On the old website the registration process works as follows: A visitor can fill in an membership application form. Then an email is sent to the member manager and he gets a link to a simple administration page where he can accept or decline the application. If he accepts it an actual user account is created automatically and the new member gets his confirmation email.

The problem is that I'm not sure where to start. Especially regarding the admin part. I've read how to create a custom registration form (which isn't exactly what I want), how to write emails and so on, but I'm not sure how to put everything together. I could write some hooks and hack everything together, but I'm wondering if there is a more elegant 'drupal-style' way.
Avoiding as much code as possible is exactly what I want to achieve by porting everything to Drupal. I won't be maintaining the page much longer, so I want it to be based on an well-documented CMS in which people are able to work in in a couple of weeks.

I totally want to get this on my own, but maybe there are some experienced Drupal developers who can give me some hints where to start and which modules would be helpful here.

Best regards
Sebastian

Comments

Some thoughts

Posted by edrupal on December 26, 2012 at 8:06pm

Hi Sebastian,

Here are the elements I identified from your post

Add custom fields to the registration form
Notify membership manager by email when new registration received
Provide easy dashboard for membership manager to administer new registrations
Notify new user if registration approved/cancelled

This is how I'd approach each:

Add custom fields - Drupal 7 provides the ability to add custom fields for every user at /admin/config/people/accounts/fields. I'd add all the relevant fields here, ticking the box ' Display on user registration form' for each field I wanted to appear on the registration form.
Notify membership manager - I'd install the User registration notification module. This enables you to configure a custom email and send it to the email address of your choice each time a user registers
Provide easy dashboard - Here I'd install the Pending User Notification Block module. This creates a block of all pending users. This block can be configured to appear in the administrators dashboard at admin/dashboard/configure
Notify new user - This happens automatically in Drupal 7 when an administrator approves or cancels and new user.

All of the above assumes you've set the Registration and Cancellation settings to 'Visitors, but administrator approval is required.' on the accounts page (admin/config/people/accounts)

Hope this helps