So now that we have some information here on the Web site that is somewhat
sensitive -- it's information that KinetECO doesn't want the general public to
know what distributors are paying for their products -- we would like to make sure
that only certain people have access to that information. Joomla
out of the box has the Login link down here at the bottom of the screen, and when
we click on that, and we scroll on down, we have the option, of course, of typing
in our User Name and Password.
We also have functionality here to recover our User Name and Password if we have
forgotten them. But then notice this last link here called Don't have an
account? Well, if we click on this, we are able to register for this Web site,
just by filling out this form. And remember the Captcha down here we configured
back in the components chapter? We turned this on as part of our contact form,
and it also shows up here in our User Registration form.
So anybody can come to this Web site now, and just fill in this tiny little
bit of information, and they will have a login for the Web site, which means
that anybody who fills out this form will be able to see the information for the distributors.
That's probably not what we really want. We only want people to log in to this
Web site who have that login. We don't want just anybody registering for the
Web site; we want to have control over who has those logins.
So I wanted to just show you some of the options that Joomla
has for controlling who can register for your Web site.
So here in the back-end of Joomla,
if we go to Users, and we go to the User Manager, up here at the top, as we have
seen in many other areas of Joomla,
there is an Options button. If you go ahead and click the Options button, this
is where we can configure some of these registration options.
So first of all, do you want to allow user registration at all of any kind?
So you can turn it on, or turn it off.
If we simply turn off registration by saying No, and say Save, what will happen
here on the login screen, when I go back to it -- I am just going to click on the
Login link again down here in the bottom -- that link to register for the Web site
is completely gone, and that functionality is disabled. So here I have just shut
off registration for the Web site altogether.
There are some other options, though.
When somebody registers for the Web site, if you do have self-registration turned
on, when someone registers for the Web site, what user group do they join?
By default, they become Registered users,
which is probably a good choice, particularly if you're letting just anybody
register for your Web site.
That means they can log in, but they can't do anything else. They can't edit
anything, they can't create anything, they can't delete anything, they
can't publish anything.
So think very carefully if you want to change that New User Registration Group.
We can also specify the Guest User Group, and by default, that's Guest, and if for
some reason you ever wanted to change that, you can.
The Send Password option here has to do with, when somebody registers for the
site, or you register someone for the site, as we created a user for this site in
the back-end of Joomla,
if they self-register, will an e-mail be generated that sends out to the person
who had the account created for them, and will that password information be
included in that e-mail?
So you can turn that on or off there.
The next thing that's of interest is this New User Account Activation, so we
have three choices here: None, Self, or Admin.
What this indicates is, None would mean I can register for the Web site on the
front-end of the Web site, and I'm immediately able to log in to the Web site
once I've registered.
I can immediately go and log in.
Self indicates that I have to have an e-mail sent to me first. The e-mail has
the little link in it that I click on;
when I click on the link, then I can log into the Web site.
So basically what Self registration does is it makes sure that people aren't
registering for your Web site with bogus e-mails. They have to receive an e-mail
that confirms that it is in fact a real e-mail, where they can check their e-mail,
and they have to click on the link before they can log in to the Web site.
And Admin means that you can register for the Web site, but you are not able
to log in to the Web site until an Administrator or Super administrator logs
in to the back-end of the Web site, and confirms that you are able to access the information.
So the question is, what is best in the case of KinetECO?
Well, I've actually just turned off user registration.
There's not that many distributors for the Web site right now, and as they sign up
new distributors, someone will have to come into the back-end of Joomla,
and create a new account for that particular distributor.
I don't think that's the end of the world.
They're just signing up a few distributors a month; it's not a huge amount of work.
The other option would be to Allow User Registration, but set the New User
Account Activation to Admin.
And so what that would mean is that anybody could register for the Web site, but the Joomla
Administrators would have to go in and allow only those who are really permitted
to access the Web site, so they'd have to hear from the sales team who are signing up
the distributors, and confirm that the e-mail addresses match before they
enable that particular login for the Web site.
I think that that second option is a little bit more work, potentially, for the Joomla
Administrator, because sometimes you wind up getting a lot of bogus
registrations on a Web site, and while Captcha will help keep those down to a
minimum, you could still wind up with a lot of work of cleaning out people who
are not really supposed to be registered for that particular Web site, as opposed
to you are going to have to create a few logins every month.
So you are just going to have to weigh which creates less work on the part of the Joomla
Administrator. And also, of course, thinking about customer service, as to whether
you want your distributors registering for the Web site, or whether you want to do
them the service of registering for them.
So those are sort of the big things that you might want to configure here in
the back-end of Joomla.
Just a couple of other minor things here; you can allow people to change their
login name, or not, so you can turn that on and off.
The Maximum Reset Count here on the screen is how many times can somebody change
their password, so right now it's set to a maximum time of 10 times. And how long
do they have between the ability to change their password?
Well, they have to wait at least an hour to change their password; that's what
these two dropdowns are about.
So you could minimize a number of times somebody could change their password, and
you could stretch out the amount of time that they have to wait before they can
change their password again.
Again, this is all about security, and managing your users, and so forth.
So, the only thing that I wound up changing on the screen is I set my Allow User
Registration to No. I've left all the rest of these settings alone, and I am
going to go ahead and say Save & Close.
And so now on the front-end of the Web site, I don't have the link anymore to
register for the Web site, and that's okay.
What I will be doing is, as new distributors are signed up, I'll be creating
logins for them, and that'll work just fine. There's only a few of these per
month, so it's not a huge amount of work that I'm taking on by doing this.