Drupal 7 Tutorial Part 12: Drupal User Account related settings

Hi Drupalers,

It's a long time back i wrote the last tutorial. I am glad that i am back to the blog. In this tutorial we are going to learn various drupal user related settings. I am using latest Drupal 7.8 version in this tutorial. Please upgrade your drupal sites to the latest version to keep up with upcoming tutorials.

We are going to see various out of the box drupal user related settings in this tutorial. Change these settings only according to your site requirements.

• Login as administrator and the click on Configuration Link in the top menu bar as shown in below image to access configuration page. Then click on Account settings link to access user related settings page.

• Once you click on above mentioned link you will be navigated to user account related settings page as shown below.
• The first setting that you see is related to anonymous user naming convention in drupal. By default all non logged in users are called anonymous users. If you want to change this word to Guests then change the text field Anonymous users name from "Anonymous" to "Guests" and click on save. Now all non logged in users are termed as "Guests".
• The second setting is related to administration role. You need to select a administration role which will get automatically all permissions related to a module when a module is enabled. You can still able to disable / enable permissions later from permissions page in drupal. 

• Next setting is related to user registration and cancelation. As you see in below image, lets check it out "Who can register accounts?" Setting.
  • If you select radio button "Administrators only"  then only admin can create new user accounts. No longer anonymous users can access "user/register" link to create new account. They will get access denied message. This will be useful for sites like corporate websites / company websites where user registration is not exposed to public.
  • If you select radio button "Visitors" then users can register new account using "user/register" page directly.
  • If you select radio button "Visitors, but administrator approval is required" then users can able to register but blocked immediately. Once admin approves account using "admin/people" settings page then only they can able to login and access features.
  • If you select check box "Require e-mail verification when a visitor creates an account." then New users will be required to validate their e-mail address prior to logging into the site, and will be assigned a system-generated password. With this setting disabled, users will be logged in immediately upon registering, and may select their own passwords during registration.
• Next setting is related to user cancelation account. As you see in below image, lets check it out "When cancelling a user account" Setting.
  • If you select radio button "Disable the account and keep its content." then if a user is disabled or blocked by admin using "admin/people" link due to spam activity or any other thing then user is blocked to access site and all the content posted by that user like comments, nodes are kept as it is.
  • If you select radio button "Disable the account and unpublish its content." then if a user is disabled or blocked by admin using "admin/people" link due to spam activity or any other thing then user is blocked to access site and all the content posted by that user like comments, nodes are unpublished from system so that users cannot access that content but can be published in future if required.
  • If you select radio button "Delete the account and make its content belong to the Anonymous user." then if a user is deleted by admin using "admin/people" link due to spam activity or any other thing then user is deleted from site and all the content posted by that user like comments, nodes are made anonmous posted content.
  • If you select radio button "Delete the account and its content." then if a user is deleted by admin using "admin/people" link due to spam activity or any other thing then user is deleted from site and all the content posted by that user like comments, nodes are also deleted immediately.

Personalization Settings:

• This settings will be applied to individual users and configurable in user edit page.
• First setting is related to signature. If you enable the checkbox "Enable signatures" then users can able to provide signatures in user edit page which will be placed end of each post and comment. For example, i enabled the signatures in drupal.org and you can see my signature is posted automatically at the end of each post in the drupal.org. See links below to see my signature in drupal.org.
• Users can navigate to their profile edit page to set signature. For example navigate to "user/1/edit" link and find the Signature text area where user can provide signature text.

http://drupal.org/node/1312914#comment-5129484

http://drupal.org/node/1302100#comment-5088754

• Next setting is related to user pictures. If you enable this setting then user can provide a user picture which will be displayed in posts & comments. User can change this picture by navigating to user edit page. For example navigate to "user/1/edit" and upload a new picture. Now you can see picture is displayed in all comments, nodes like below.

• All other settings in Personalization settings are related to user pictures.
  • Picture Directory: Specify the folder directory inside sites/default/file where you want to store user pictures.
  • Default Picture: URL of picture to display for users with no custom picture selected. Leave blank for none.
  • Picture display style: Auto styling and resizing of images using imagacache and styles.
  • Picture upload dimensions: Pictures larger than this will be scaled down to this size.
  • Picture upload file size: Maximum allowed size of picture.
  • Picture Guidelines: This text is displayed at the picture upload form in addition to the default guidelines. It's useful for helping or instructing your users.

E-mail Template Settings:

• Using these settings you can edit user related activity email contents. For example when a user is registered welcome e-mail is sent to the user, if you want to edit that email content this is the place. There are lot more templates available like when user asks for request new password a email will be sent, you can edit that email content too. Let's check it out all the email settings as shown in below image.

• As you see in above screen you can edit various email templates easily. One thing you can notice is special tokens used in E-mail subject and body which are wrapped in square brackets. This tokens are dynamically replaces based on user data. For example if use token [user:name] then username will be replaced with the token while sending.

After editing any above settings, click on save configuration to save the user related settings. Stay tuned with tutorials to know about Drupal Taxonomy Concepts in my next Drupal 7 tutorial.

Cheers,

Anil Sagar