Site-specific signup actions

Why

When a user signs up, Zotonic verifies the validity of some information, such as the e-mail address and the password strength. If these verifications succeed, it stores the user data in the Zotonic database. If you have your own database with project-specific user data, you may want to insert additional information into this database on sign up. To do this, you need to modify the sitename.erl file, where sitename is the name of your site. Remember that this file is located in apps_user/sitename/.

Assumptions

Readers are assumed to be comfortable with Erlang syntax and use of the command shell.

How

Open apps_user/sitename/src/sitename.erl with your favorite editor.

Example 1: a gaming website with several point accounts for each user. Add the following code:

-export([observe_signup_done/2]).

%% @doc Perform additional actions when a user signs up
observe_signup_done({signup_done, UserId, _IsVerified, _Props, _SignupProps},
        Context) ->
    % Create the necessary accounts for the user:
    create_user_accounts(UserId, [chess, go, checkers]).

% Implementation not shown here
create_user_accounts(_UserId, _Context) ->
    todo.

Save your changes and quit

Recompile zotonic:

$ cd /path/to/zotonic
$ make

Now you’ll see that when a signup is done successsfully, your create_user_accounts/2 function will be called.