Offering each user a custom login destination

A post on the drupal.org discussion forum recently caught my attention:

I’m running a CMS which restricts access by using OG. As such users are registered to one group or another and in order to do away with unnecessary clicks I’d like a user to be automatically directed to the group front page to which they belong. As such if I belong to the ‘design’ group, the system should automatically redirect me to the ‘design’ home page when I log in. Is there a module that will enable this for me?

We often use Drupal’s core profile module together with the Login Destination module to offer a “login page” feature on our sites. Here’s how to do it on yours.

1. Set up a Profile field

First enable the profile module, set its permissions accordingly and create a new profile field:

• Category: Login settings
• Title: Login page
• Form name: profile_login_url
• Type: URL
• Explanation: Enter the full URL for the page you would like your login destination to be. For example, enter http://example.com/group/design if you want to go to the Design Group home page immediately after logging in.

It’s up to you, but we usually set this profile field to “Private” instead of “Hidden” so site members can click on it when viewing their own profile.

2. Set up a Login Destination

Finally, configure Login Destination to use a PHP snippet and paste this in:

If the user hasn’t set a Login URL, the referring page is used instead. This is much better than sending a user to his or her profile. Imagine visiting a private page without being logged in and getting an “access denied” message. After logging in, you are then sent to the user profile instead of the original page. This can be incredibly annoying so we opt to use the referring page instead.

3. Check your account settings

Now you and your users will have a new “Login settings” tab on the account settings page with a “Login page” setting.