Drupal 7: Login Destination Based On User Role

The Login Destination module is a neat little module that allows site admins to customize where the user will be sent to when they login. It provides a few of different ways of customizing, including a PHP snippet box that allows fine grained control.

What I needed to do on a recent project was to change the login destination for a single user role, but redirect everyone else to their user profile page. This required the use of the PHP snippet box. In order to get access to the current user object I had to include it into the scope of the PHP snippet code by using the following.

global $user;

With this in hand I could then use the roles property of the $user object to find out what role the current user. However, because the roles property is an array (due to the ability assign users to more than one role) a direct comparison is not possible. So I used PHP function in_array() to search the array for the role name. The following snippet is what I came up with, it redirects any user assigned to "An Awesome Role" to the create new page form, everyone else gets redirected to their user profile. Note that you should not use the php tags in the snippet area.

global $user;
if (in_array('An Awesome Role', $user->roles)) {
  return 'node/add/page';
} else{
  return 'user';
}

This works for most circumstances, but site admins do actually have the ability to edit the role names, which will mean that if they do your rules will no longer work. This won't happen much, but when it does you will have to update the redirect rules with the new role names. It is possible to use the role ID instead as this won't change, even if the role names are updated. In order to use this you'll need to get the keys of the roles array as the keys contain the role IDs. This can be done using the array_keys() function in the following manner.

global $user;
if (in_array(3, array_keys($user->roles))) {
  return 'node/add/page';
} else{
  return 'user';
}

This means that no matter what you change your user roles to this rule will always work.