Question: Proposed senario:

A current member enters their email address on a profile form. If the email address matches a current CiviCRM member then the member is registered in Joomla and an email is sent to their email address with login credentials and a link to the login page.

From what I've read this should be possible. The issue is the available information that I have found is vaugue and does not explain the concept and steps in implementing the process in much detail. I understand that I need to set up Joomla to allow self registration and a profile must be created in CiviCRM that will check the membership status.

Which type of profile and which profile settings need to be activated?

When Joomla is set up for self registration an unwanted registration link is shown on the login page that sends the user to a Joomla registration form that bypasses the CiviCRM profile form. How do I work around that?

A step by step guide and any advice would be very helpful.

Thank you for any help you can provide.

Keith

Answer: 
See whether [this extension](https://github.com/aydun/CiviCRM-JoomlaReg) helps. The usage is a bit different in that it uses the standard self-registration process but only allows registration to succeed if the email address is already in CiviCRM. It does not check membership but could do.

[CiviAuthenticate](https://extensions.joomla.org/extension/civiauthenticate-for-civicrm/) might also be useful. It does not restrict registration but does restrict login access to members.
You could hide the registration link via CSS on the login page, and add a module (on the same page) with a "Create a user account here" link, leading to your CiviCRM profile. (Or you could create a template override for this page, but it's a bit more complex, and the above should do, IMHO.)

As for the CiviCRM profile for the registration page, you can create your own, and make sure you include all the key fields, including first name, last name and email (at minimum), and in the 'Advanced Settings' section of the profile setup you check off the "Account creation required" option for the 'Joomla user account creation option?' field.

While we're happy with the above set-up, we are also allowing for user registration via social network accounts (Facebook and Google in our case ... via the JFBConnect component), which bypasses the CiviCRM profile registration form. So, for that we've implemented this extension (<https://civicrm.org/extensions/joomla-2-civicrm-user-synchronization>), which creates a new contact (if it doesn't exist), or maps the new user to an existing contact (if it does exist).

Feel free to @ me if you'd like to chat more, and I'd be happy to connect.