Ubercart

Creating an "unauthenticated" role could be risky. I'm worried about content being owned by some anon role or user. An easy tweak (since we're still alpha?) would be to have an ubercart admin toggle setting to make newly created user accounts "blocked" by default. That way, if desired, the account notification email could be supressed along with removing the order confirmation user/pass text. This in combo with creating an order-promoted role to hold these blocked users would make keeping track of them (and later purging) easy.

I guess I'm always thinking a lot about not storing user personal data for too long, unless it's necessary. No cart that I know of has a good way to purge out orders and users. Always messy. I think that every year it's a good practice to purge orders once they've been migrated to the billing system. Especially if users don't really have any function other than reviewing their past orders. I'm really thinking about data retention stuff and privacy.

It's part of a bigger discussion about shopping carts vs billing systems. Quickbooks makes a great low-end billing system for a small ecommerce site. Most shopping carts get lost at some point trying to offer reporting and features that really belong in a billing system. Many store owners make the mistake of confusing a shopping cart with their all-in-one financial system. Always a bad idea.

Whew, so my comments about creating users in Drupal really stem for a desire to make the shopping cart very lean, not creating users that don't do much. Also being privacy stingy by default.

Anyway, what about just making an admin setting, maybe right below the "send e-mail notification of new account" which says "make users blocked by default" to prevent login and password retrieval.

Ok, thanks for your input. Good stuff in ubercartland.

That's exactly what anonymous checkout is for. You won't have to do anything to your install for this to happen.