Using Membership In Umbraco - Part 2 - Registering Users

This is part 2 of a number of articles looking at the basics of using Umbraco Membership.  In part 1 we looked at creating a member through the Umbraco admin site and adding a login page to the front end website.  In this article we will create a registration page to allow users to sign up and log in to your website. 

As with the login page in part 1 we will use the standard asp.net membership controls to create our registration page. I'm using the site I created in part 1 or you could grab a free instance of Umbraco from our plans page.

As with the login control there are a number of places our registration control can be placed, for simplicity I'll add it directly to a new template I've called 'Register'.  As I'm using the business starter kit, the template will need to be created with a parent of 'Starterkit Master' and the content added to the 'cp_content' placeholder:

<asp:CreateUserWizard ID="CreateUserWizard1" runat="server">

    <WizardSteps>

        <asp:CreateUserWizardStep ID="CreateUserWizardStep1" runat="server">

        </asp:CreateUserWizardStep>

        <asp:CompleteWizardStep ID="CompleteWizardStep1" runat="server">

        </asp:CompleteWizardStep>

    </WizardSteps>

</asp:CreateUserWizard>

This adds an instance of the standard asp.net membership 'CreateUserWizard' control which without any customisation will display a simple one page register control.  As with most standard membership controls the customisation  options are considerable.  For more details see the MSDN page here. For this example I will stick with the default options.

Now that we have created a new template we need to allow a document type to use it.  Under settings -> document types select the 'Textpage' document type and tick 'register' as an allowed template:

Next create a new page of type 'Textpage' and tell it to use the new 'Register' template:

If you publish the page and navigate to it you should now see a simple, all be in unstyled register page.

The next bit is crucial and a common 'gotcha' when creating members in Umbraco.  In part 1 of this how to we created a new member via the admin area and created a 'Customers' user group and a 'Customer' user type.  User types allow you to specify custom properties for certain types of members, for example you may decide to add an 'invoice number' field to all 'Customers'. I'll cover member properties in a future article.

Member groups allow you to group your users together so you can treat different groups of users differently. The main use is to selectively allow groups of users access to certain pages, for example 'customers' may be allowed to see the 'my account' page when they login. You may also decide to send you monthly newsletter to all members of the 'Customers' group.

When a user registers through your new page you therefore need to specify as a minimum what type of user they are.  The simplest way to do this is to specify the 'defaultMemberTypeAlias' attribute in the web.config file.  You'll find this in the Membership section as an attribute on the UmbracoMembershipProvider entry.  You can update this in any text editor and if you are using our hosting either modify using an FTP client or via the online management panel. 

For our example we want new users to be of the 'Customer' type so update the attribute accordingly: 

        <add name="UmbracoMembershipProvider" type="umbraco.providers.members.UmbracoMembershipProvider" enablePasswordRetrieval="false" enablePasswordReset="false" requiresQuestionAndAnswer="false" defaultMemberTypeAlias="Customer" passwordFormat="Hashed" />

With this attribute updated you should now be able to navigate to your register page, complete the form and see a new member appear in the Umbraco admin area.

In future articles we'll use our new members to selectively show them pages and different content within pages when they are logged in.  We'll also look at member properties and using members in C# code to perform advanced operations.