I’m trying to do a few things. The first, is to just duplicate the existing member templates, so I don’t screw them up, as I’m fiddling and tweaking. Ultimately, I’m trying to figure out if:
1) It’s possible to change which fields on the registration form are required; or
2) Use PHP or HTML to auto-fill some of the required fields, since we don’t care about them
additionally, I also want to remove the table structure currently used by the registration forms, and have the form better fit in to the overall look and feel of the rest of the site.
The larger issue is that the site really isn’t a membership site, the mailing list function would be ideal, except it doesn’t allow us to collect any additional data. We want three simple fields: Name, Organization, and Email. Additionally, since the signup form is also tied to downloads, the use of cookies or sessions is nice as well.
I didn’t want to hack the backend to add the two additional fields to the mailinglist table, or the changes to have those fields populated, because I plan on keeping the client upgraded on future versions of EE for the next few releases. So I decided to use the membership registration system instead, since it does allow custom fields.
Since these “members” get assigned to a member group that have no control panel privileges, it doesn’t allow them to comment or pretty much anything else; I figured the username can be their email address (so echo email address to username field), their password could be assigned by us, remove the url, and agreement text, then the only display fields would be Screen Name (relabeled to Name), Organization (custom field), and Email.
