Hello,
I have an unusual problem:
We provide a service for schools. Students make Drupal accounts and use it to do a school project. Problem is, many students don't have email and indeed, the school doesn't *want* the students to have email. Worse, they want the teacher to create the student accounts.
I don't like this, yes it's stupid, but there is no chance of me changing their mind about this. I'm hoping that someone here might help me find a good solution for this problem.
As part of the service, we have a custom web application that I wrote. This application already has a record of all the students and teachers and schools. So, for example, I could consider using this application to insert new users into the Drupal database. The teacher clicks a button that says "make Drupal accounts for all my students" and a PHP script makes the accounts.
Could that work?
Personally, I am afraid of editing the Drupal database directly, but perhaps there is a safe API I can use? Or is it reasonably safe to insert records into the Drupal database by hand?
I can see problems with this idea (e.g. what do I use as user names? Student names are not unique). But I can't think of anything better. Does anyone have a better idea?
I don't really know any good way to solve this problem. The problem is not urgent. For the time being we can get a staff member with admin access to create student accounts using fake email addresses. But I hope to find a better long-term solution.
Thanks for the help.
Daniel.