Prevent User from changing email address

Hi,

I was able to do this by opening up the wp-admin/profile.php and on line 79 change the email input box to disabled.

Before:
<input type=”text” name=”email” id=”email” value=”<?php echo $profileuser->user_email ?>” />

After:
<input disabled type=”text” name=”email” id=”email” value=”<?php echo $profileuser->user_email ?>” />

This will essentially “grey” out the box so that they can see it but cannot change it.

Hope this helps.

Progresst, thanks for your reply but when I modified the code as you proposed, and then tried to save the profile info by clicking ‘Update Profile’ I get an error from WordPress stating,

“ERROR please type in an email address”

I then figured out another way to accomplish what I needed.

Look for:

<input type="text" name="email" value="<?php echo $profileuser->user_email ?>" /></label>

and change “text” to “hidden” as in:

<input type="hidden" name="email" value="<?php echo $profileuser->user_email ?>" /></label>

and to further customize it, I removed the line above it that says:

<label><?php _e('E-mail: (required)') ?>

so that no reference to email appears in the profile.

Obviously this is not something everyone will want to do but my client handles all of the authors email address info from admin using user-edit.php so that authors that are no longer employed by the company can modify their email addresses or retireve login passwords by use of the retrieve lost password feature.

As a warning, it is easy enough to use a DOM editor (eg firebug in firefox) to re-enable the input and change the email address.

Aaron, Do you know if there is a way to prevent that from occuring?

This isn’t a clean fix, and I would suggest trying to find a better way but off the top of my head I don’t know of a better way.

open: /wp-admin/includes/user.php
Find: `if ( isset( $_POST[’email’] ))
$user->user_email = wp_specialchars( trim( $_POST[’email’] ));`
Replace With:

if ( isset( $_POST['email'] ) && $user_id != $current_user->id){
	$user->user_email = wp_specialchars( trim( $_POST['email'] ));
}else{
	$user->user_email = $userdata->user_email
}

Basically, if any user tries to edit themselves it won’t let them. This includes the administrator, so you might want to use the following. (Change ‘1’ to the Administrator’s id.)

if ( isset( $_POST['email'] ) && ($user_id != $current_user->id || $current_user->id == 1)){