We use django-registration in almost all our projects. However, we don't like Django's limited username and would like to allow our users to sign up via email.

This project provides a custom authentication backend which allows users to authenticate via email. We also provide an EmailRegistrationForm which checks if an email has already been taken.

Since we still have to store a username and since emails can easily be longer than 30 characters, the username will be computed as a md5 hexdigest of the email address.

We included a urls.py that overrides all URLs of django-registration and Django's auth with a clean and sane structure and you will find a default set of all necessary templates.

Install this package::

pip install -e git://github.com/bitmazk/django-registration-email#egg=registration_email

Add registration and registration_email to your INSTALLED_APPS::

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    # all your other apps
    'registration',
    'registration_email',
]

Update your urls.py::

url(r'^accounts/', include('registration_email.backends.default.urls')),

Add some settings to your settings.py::

ACCOUNT_ACTIVATION_DAYS = 7
AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS = (
    'registration_email.auth.EmailBackend',
)
LOGIN_REDIRECT_URL = '/'

Run syncdb::

./manage.py syncdb

django-registration-email introduces a new setting:

Default: None

The URL to redirect to after a successful account activation. If you leave this at None the method post_activation_redirect of your registration backend will be used.

Default: None

The URL to redirect to after a successful registration. If you leave this at None the method post_registration_redirect of your registration backend will be used.

Let's say you want to collect the user's first name and last name when he registers. In order to achieve that, you need to do the following:

1. Create a custom form

Create a new app my_registration in your project and give it a forms.py where you override our EmailRegistrationForm and your desired extra fields:

from django import forms
from registration_email.forms import EmailRegistrationForm

class CustomEmailRegistrationForm(EmailRegistrationForm):
    first_name = forms.CharField()
    last_name = forms.CharField()

Do NOT override the form's save() method.

2. Override the URL

Now you need to tell the registration view that it is supposed to use the custom form:

# your main urls.py
...
from django.conf import settings
from registration.views import register
from my_registration.forms import CustomEmailRegistrationForm

urlpatterns = patterns(
    '' ,
    ...
    url(r'^accounts/register/$',
        register,
        {'backend': 'registration.backends.simple.SimpleBackend',
        'template_name': 'registration/registration_form.html',
        'form_class': CustomEmailRegistrationForm,
        'success_url': getattr(
            settings, 'REGISTRATION_EMAIL_REGISTER_SUCCESS_URL', None),
        },
        name='registration_register', 
    ),

    url(r'^accounts/', include('registration_email.backends.default.urls')),
    ...
) 

3. Create a signal handler

In the urls.py above I'm using the SimpleBackend. When you have a look at that backend you will see that the backend sends a signal after creating and logging in the user. The signal will get all parameters that we need in order to access the data that has been validated and sent by the form, so let's build a signal handler:

# in my_registration.models.py
from django.dispatch import receiver
from registration.signals import user_registered

@receiver(user_registered)
def user_registered_handler(sender, user, request, **kwargs):
    user.first_name = request.POST.get('first_name')
    user.last_name = request.POST.get('last_name')
    user.save()

This method has the drawback that you save the user two times in a row. If you have concerns about performance you would have to create your own my_registration.backends.CustomRegistrationBackend class. That class would inherit registration.backends.simple.SimpleBackend and override the register method.

But really, we are talking about registration here, I can't imagine how saving the user twice could do any harm.

If you had another value for AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS in your settings.py before it might be that it is saved in your django_session table. I found no other way around this than to delete the rows in that table.

• Password reset link points to original django template