Question

I am using WordPress for the site and have added a user registration form on the front end however I am using the value attribute to populate it with pre defined text before the user clicks in the box.

However I need the form to not submit unless the user has clicked in the username box and filled in a username of there choice so it changes the default wording what was in there.

So far I am using

if ( !$userdata['user_login'] )
    $error = __('A username is required for registration.', 'frontendprofile');
elseif ( username_exists($userdata['user_login']) )
    $error = __('Sorry, that username already exists!', 'frontendprofile');

Which checks if a username has been populated but because I have a default value in here already then this validation isn’t working so is there a way to change this so the form wont submit unless the username has changed from the defualt value

Answer 1

There are many ways you could work around this. One could be to check the submitted value. E.g. (Assuming the “defaultValue” is an illegal user_login)

if ( !$userdata['user_login'] || 
     $userdata['user_login'] == "defaultValue" || 
     !isNotEmpty($userdata['user_login']))
    $error = __('A username is required for registration.', 'frontendprofile');
else if ( username_exists($userdata['user_login']) )
    $error = __('Sorry, that username already exists!', 'frontendprofile');

function isNotEmpty($input) 
{
    $stringTemp = $input;
    $stringTemp = trim($stringTemp);

    if($stringTemp !== '')
    {
         return true;
    }

    return false;
}

Note: PHP also has an empty function already. This is just an example method.

You should add in Javascript Validation to check the fields & I’m assuming you are already protecting yourself from SQL injection etc.

Hope this helps