Anyone knows a good hack to make django-registration use emails as usernames?

Question

I am planning to do email-registration-activation on my site which will be launched very soon. I have just started looking at django-registration and I am open to other email-registration-activation system available on django.

My only requirement is that for my site, I don't actually use usernames. Rather, user logs in with their emails and passwords. I want to get an expert's opinion how to modify django-registration cleanly and safely for this purpose.

If there are easier solutions which are scalable, feel free to post up here.

Answer 1

We used django-registration with a custom backend, where we overwrote (or defined) the clean method of the registration form:

def clean():
    ...
    # use the email as the username 
    if 'email' in self.cleaned_data:
        self.cleaned_data['username'] = self.cleaned_data['email']

There are other ways:

• http://bitbucket.org/hakanw/django-email-usernames/wiki/Home
• http://djangosnippets.org/snippets/74/
• http://www.davidcramer.net/code/224/logging-in-with-email-addresses-in-django.html

Note that by default, usernames can be only 30 chars long. You'll need a hack for that, too:

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2610088/can-djangos-auth-user-username-be-varchar75-how-could-that-be-done