There are some sites where you want the user’s username to be their email address. This is becoming more and more common on websites. The Register snippet uses the 'email' input field from its form for the email, but it uses the 'username' input field for the username. In this article we’ll see an easy way to change that.
Options
When a MODX Forum user asked about this, my first thought was to just call the field 'username' but make the caption as 'Email'. As a long-time programmer, though, this solution seemed to be asking for trouble down the road. Mis-naming form fields is almost never a good way to solve a problem, and it can lead to some really frustrating situations when you hit a snag later on and have to come back to maintain the code. Worse, there’s the problem of how to get the email into the 'email' field of the User Profile. There’s also a chance that it would confuse sight-impaired visitors using screen readers, and cause trouble for people who use any kind of autofill option for forms — not to mention the issues with validation and getting validation error message to show up in the right place.
Since I didn’t like the first idea, I assumed that the solution would require a custom postHook snippet specified in the Register snippet tag. The snippet would get the value of the 'email' input field from the $_POST array, set it as the value of the 'username' field of the modUser object, and save the user.
As I was looking through the labyrinthine code of the Login package (which Register is a part of), however, I stumbled onto an undocumented property that makes both of the solutions above unnecessary.
The Solution
This couldn’t be much easier. The &usernameField property of the Register snippet tells the snippet the name of the field to use for the username. To use the email field for the username, all you have to do is add this property to the Register Snippet tag:
&usernameField=`email`
With this property, the value of the 'email' input field can be validated as an email, but will be automatically written to the 'username' field of the modUser object. Better yet, the value will also be written to the 'email' field of the modUserProfile object. If it’s not a valid email, the error message will show up where it should. It’s a great solution, and really simple to implement.
Note that you’ll want to modify the Login Tpl chunk to ask for the email address.
Bob Ray is the author of the MODX: The Official Guide and dozens of MODX Extras including QuickEmail, NewsPublisher, SiteCheck, GoRevo, Personalize, EZfaq, MyComponent and many more. His website is Bob’s Guides. It not only includes a plethora of MODX tutorials but there are some really great bread recipes there, as well.