Register users by e-mail

Question

I want to use an email address instead of username to register and login my members. I've got the login part working using some of the code in this answer. Works fine but as expected wordpress still wants a username on the register page (custom, not the default).

This line of code registers the user: $user_signup = wp_insert_user( $user_data );, and when registering I get the following error:

Cannot create a user with an empty login name.

I'm guessing this can be solved by removing the appropriate filter, but I'm new to wordpress. What's the code to remove the username requirement?

Answer 1

This is a required field (http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/wp_create_user) and I think that more than one function in the core of Wordpress relies on that. So I would not recommend to code around it or alter any other WP core files as the next update could render all these changes back to the default values.