Question

I want to shift my current site to drupal. for that I have to do some change in drupal. first I added some columns to drupal’s user table(I don’t know this will harm drupal or not). now I want to change drupal’s _password_crypt function in password.inc file because my users passwords are encrypted by Mysql’s PASSWORD() function. my question is that, should I edit _password_crypt function or there is a way to implement my new password function as plugin and tell drupal to use that, because I don’t want to change Drupal core. and if I change Drupal’s default _password_crypt function what problems will I face in the feature. for example can I update Drupal without any problem?

BR

Answer 1

You should not add columns to Drupal’s user table. The prime directive in Drupal is not to interfere directly with tables you do not own. Such arbitrary changes may create problems when updating.

If you want to add fields to the user entity, you can do so safely by means of Configuration » Account Settings » Manage Fields.

And you should not hack the _password_crypt function. If you want to use an external (to Drupal core) table for storing passwords and method for authenticating users, there is a good tutorial telling you how do this at api.drupal.org