Being aware that member services on web sites vary greatly in capabilities and purpose, we aimed for two goals in creating the SiteMember app:

1. Provide as much out-of-the-box as possible.
2. Provide a simple and standard means of customizing every detail.

For the first goal, SiteMember offers the following capabilities built-in:

• Member login/logout and authentication via the saf.Session.Acl package.
• A default member home page.
• A default member registration form.
• Default member options including changing their passwords and updating their preferences.
• A password recovery form.
• An alphabetical member directory listing with public profiles.
• The ability to contact a member through the site without revealing their email address.
• The ability to remember login sessions until the next time they come back.

For the second goal, we designed SiteMember so that each of these features can be overridden with a custom implementation for a given site, simply by specifying the location of the custom box or form handler in the inc/app/sitemember/conf/properties.php file. For member home pages and public profiles, you can even specify a series of boxes or forms to display, so that you can offer multiple services to your members.

An example customization would be to change the 'home' handler, which can be done via the following steps:

1. Create an app that will hold the customizations for your web site. In this example, I'll call the app myapp.

2. Copy the inc/app/sitemember/boxes/home box into your custom app. This will be used as a starting point.

3. Modify the index.php file of your custom 'home' handler to suit your needs. For example, if you wanted to show a different member home screen based on the role of the user, you could say something like the following:

<?php

$role = session_role ();

switch ($role) {
    case 'customer':
    case 'supplier':
    case 'subscriber':
        header ('Location: /index/' . $role . '-home');
        exit;
    default:
        echo template_simple ('other.spt');
}

?>

4. When your custom box is ready, change the following line in inc/app/sitemember/conf/properties.php from this:

// This is the default user home page handler.
appconf_set ('home', 'box:sitemember/home');

To this:

// This is the default user home page handler.
appconf_set ('home', 'box:myapp/home');

When a user logs in through SiteMember, they should now automatically be sent to your new handler instead of the default one, even if they request the default handler directly (it is disabled automatically with the change to the settings).