Problems overriding mod.member_settings.php email_prefs_form and update_un_pw_form

Question

I have an extension and module that handles authentication for EE. I'm having some troubles understanding how to go about over-riding the handling in mod.member_settings.php. There is a hook for update|edit_user_preferences but it looks like it used to be that everything was under that hook. Sometime later they split things out but didn't add any additional hooks.

What I need to do is handle the email_prefs_form and update_un_pw_form. Ive thought of some ways I can think of doing this with the caveat that I don't how or if any of these are EE ways of doing things. One is to have the actions of the forms handled by my module/extension. Another is to trap sessions_end and try and return a view from my module's view directory (mod.member_settings seems to override any attempt to do this). Another might be to get hooks in mod.member_settings.php somehow to handle the submits.

Does anyone have any specific suggestions? I'm fairly new to EE so I don't really know what questions to ask.

Answer 1

Are you writing your own extension? What for? There are plenty of existing extensions which will let you do pretty much anything with members. Perhaps we could better help by suggesting an add-on to use instead of writing something custom (check out FreeMember, Authenticate, Safecracker Registration, Zoo Visitor, or Profile:Edit).

The "EE way of doing things" is for your module to provide tags which allow other developers to completely customize the look and feel - that is why there is no easy way to return view files.

The built-in member module is a bit backwards in this regard, and doesn't follow the normal conventions to allow easy customization of the design. That is why so many add-ons have cropped up to replace the member module.

If you want an example of an EE authentication module, check out FreeMember - it's open source so should provide you with a good starting point.