simple or semi registration.

I am trying to put together a site which hires out equipment.
The full Joomla regisration process is a bit 'heavy' when you are trying to attract customers, but I do want some articles to be restricted to customers who have at least provided their email address.
At the end of the selection process as they checkout I expect the customers to provide a full registration process then on any next visit they can simply log-in.
I can use CF to produce a simple form for 'email' and a 'password' Then I would like to mark that user as 'registered' from my point of view.
Can I just modify the jos_users table and write 'registered' in the 'usertype' column ? Will that be accepted by the Joomla system as 'registered'? I could of course provide a users table of my own but that would lose a lot of the benefits of Joomla.

Any help, thoughts or comments would be welcome.
--
Dave

Hi Dave,

Quick answer because it's late here - No, you can't just write to the jos_users file and expect it to work. The main difference is that the password is stored as an MD5 hash - not the raw password.

It is though perfectly possible to do a 'silent' registration where you take a Name and email and generate the username and password and display or mail them out to the user.

Bob

Thanks for the prompt reply bob.
But i don't imagine Joomla does anything with that MD5 hash except to use it as a comparison next time the user logs in ?

Can I not collect email and password and feed the email in as the username as well as email? As long as I do this on every 'login' occasion I imagine Joomla will not know!!

I suppose I must try it and see!
Sleep well!
--
Dave

Hi Dave,

If you are going to do silent logins too then, yes I think that will work. AFAIK Joomla does just compare the MD5 hashes. I'm not sure if it accepts emails as usernames (just don't know about the @ & .) but you could always strip the punctuation.

Bob

Well I tried it by simply writing abcdefg into username etc etc of jos_users (risky ??) etc with PHPmyAdmin and it all looked OK.
But things stopped working. In particular chronoforms form I had written stopped behaving correctly. So I have abandoned that idea and am going to work with registration switched off until checkout. I shall ask for email address if and when it becomes necessary.

By the way having paid the vast sum for a license what happens now? Do I get a Christmas card ? or perhaps a Hershey bar !
It does not matter until this stuff goes live which will not be for months yet.
--
Dave

H Dave,

This is Max's product and site and he deals with all the registration stuff, normally you get an email with a licensed version and some upgrade instructions more or less by return. If you haven't received it (please check your spam folder) drop him a note through the Contact form here.

Bob

Hi Dave,

I answered your message by email, let me know there your response please!🙂

Regards
Max