Question

I am using the django-registration package. I do not want people to have a username but to enter instead their first and last names. Like on Facebook. How can I do that ?

Answer 1

Django auth (and by extension admin) requires a username – full stop. So you’ll have to go to some effort to work around that.

You have a few issues to consider:
1) Firstname Lastname will rapidly lead to collisions. What does your service do when the second “John Smith” wants to sign up?

2) You have to create a username, so you’ll likely use a hash of firstname_lastname. Again, what do you do when you get a second exact match?

3) You’ll have to write a custom auth backend to take care of the login, this isn’t actually that hard.

A prototype of the solution to #2 can be found here – basically in the form processing, generate a random unique hash.

while True:
    self.cleaned_data['username'] = str(md5(str(self.data['email']) + str(random.random())).hexdigest())[0:30]
    try:
        user = User.objects.get(username__iexact=self.cleaned_data['username'])
    except User.DoesNotExist:
        break