Detecting A Drupal Users First Login
Being fairly new to Drupal, I was interested to know whether it had anything built in that let you know, or detect, when a user was logging in for the first time e.g. to show them a welcome message.
As far as I know, there’s no method in the API to detect this. However, after checking the global $user object's properties to see what we had to play with, it turns out it wasn't all that tricky:
- the
$global usercontains 3 timestamp properties:created,accessandlogin - when a user logs in for the first time, all 3 of these timestamps are equal
This means we can check whether a user is logging in for the first time with something like this:
function is_first_time_login($user) {
return ($user->created == $user->login) &&
($user->login == $user->access);
}
Now we can call that function where we need to in our elsewhere in our code. For example:
function foo() {
global $user;
...
if (is_first_time_login($user)) {
drupal_set_message(WELCOME_MSG);
}
...
}
So far, this approach seems to be working quite well 
good day my friend, i just want to clarify something…created timestamp will only be equal to login and access if the user logs in right after registration, example if a particular user registers on the current date the values will be; created = current time : login = 0 : access = 0 , and if that user will login let’s say the 2nd day from current then the values would be created = original created date : login = offset + 2 days : access = offset + 2 days
Ah, good point – hadn’t thought of that. The site I used this on was set to log a user in straight away once they’d registered, hence the values being the same.