Send out a unique (unprotected) link per user

Question

I'm the admin of a Drupal site with 200+ users. I sort of rolled into this, so I'm no Drupal expert, although I've managed to understand it quite good now.

This is a site for our sportsclub and we want all existing users to confirm their membership (of the club) for the coming season.

We would prefer to do this a simple as possible and send each user a link which, when clicked on, will confirm their renewal. Ideally, this is a link with some sort of unique hash, so we can make it unprotected. This would avoid having to log in.

We want to do this (keep it as simple as possible) because we've noticed a lot of members just don't do it (go to the site, log in, go to the correct page if not already there, and click the yes link to renew).

Is this possible (with a module perhaps)? Sending out a unique link per user?

Answer 1

I don't know of a single module to do this.

I would suggest looking at the VBO module (views bulk operations).

You can create an "email" action and customize what gets sent.

From your description I think the biggest barrier you're facing is that users don't want to login, and you'd like them to just click a link.

To do that you're going to have to roll your own module and likely make use of a menu hook with a callback to a function that processes the link.

Answer 2

This is how I solved it, although jdu is right, it should be in a custom module. I have made one before, so I will look into that, but for now, here's my solution:

I created a computed field for my users where I calculate a hash based on their username.

I created a new unprotected page, and I will send them the link with their unique hash by mail. As an aside: I'm using Mailchimp which integrates with Drupal so I should be able to take out that hash and use it in the mail.

Once on the page, I execute custom PHP where I check if the necessary query string parameters are present. Then I set the necessary field, confirming their new membership, save the user and notify them on the page.

The mail hasn't been sent out to all our users yet, but I've tried it myself, and it works.

As jdu said, the biggest barrier is the fact that they won't login, because this also means a lot of them will only half-read the mail, won't click on the link, will postpone it,... But it can't be any more simple than this.