By jason342 on

Will changing username of USER 1 (main user) cause any problems and have consequences to the database, performance of the site, or anything else?

And from your experience, if you have ever changed USER 1's username, what are the drawbacks?

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

lurkltd’s picture

lurkltd commented

This shouldn't make a difference since the key is probably the uid, right?

jason342’s picture

jason342 commented

Don't know what you mean by uid. I was referring to changing the username via the User 1's user account. Is there a certified way to change the username, if my method is wrong?

Rowanw’s picture

Rowanw commented

No.

Nothing will happen if you change your username.

Christefano-oldaccount’s picture

Christefano-oldaccount commented

The only problem I can think of is if you use the path module or Pathauto to alias user 1's profile. Changing user 1's name will not update any old path aliases to the new name.

Drupalace-1’s picture

Drupalace-1 commented

The earlier comments are correct: I've changed the ID 1 user name for several sites, and had no troubles – other than scratching my head over seeing the old user name continue to appear in URLs, which I finally figured out was due to old aliases. Change the aliases, and that trouble disappears too.

So go ahead and make the change; it seems safe. (But back up beforehand, just in case!)

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A site by, of, and for the Drupal newbie: http://www.drupalace.com

jason342’s picture

jason342 commented

other than scratching my head over seeing the old user name continue to appear in URLs, which I finally figured out was due to old aliases. Change the aliases, and that trouble disappears too

You mean change the User 1's username in 'URL Aliases' ?

Drupalace-1’s picture

Drupalace-1 commented

Right. For example, my site creates the alias "user/drupalace" for the path "user/1". If I recall correctly what I've seen on some other sites I've worked on, if I now change my user name to "drupaldoofus", I won't run into any troubles – except that when I go to my user account page, "user/drupalace" will still show up in the URL. When changing user name, Drupal won't search out and change URL aliases containing that user name. (Sounds like a good task for a third-party module...) So I'd have to manually change the alias from "user/drupalace" to "user/drupaldoofus", and then everything will look as it should.

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A site by, of, and for the Drupal newbie: http://www.drupalace.com