CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I've been trying to use tokens in emails so that users who do not have a Joomla account can receive an email, see and update their details and create a joomla account. This is all within core functionality, but in practice I found it very fiddly to use. I think I now have it so I thought I'd record some experiences here. Of course these may be specific to my installation, but they may help others.

1. The option to create a Joomla account appears to only work if the profile was set up to require it and the Joomla menu item is of the right type (create, not edit) and was created after the profile was set up to use this option. Check that your profile actually works with an account create option on it. If it does, go to 2.

2. The URL to send for a can be  |http://www.example.org/index.php?option=com_civicrm&task=civicrm/profile/edit?reset=1&gid=N&id={contact.contact_id}&{contact.checksum} (which is what I put in the manual here http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC32/Mail-merge+Tokens+for+Contact+Data) - this works in that it shows a populated profile but it does not give the usual site layout and never appears to offer the login option for users without and account.

3. Assuming the profile is also a menu item, you can use |http://www.example.org/index.php?option=com_civicrm&view=Profiles&layout=edit&Itemid=YOURMENUITEMNUMBER&reset=1&gid=N&id={contact.contact_id}&{contact.checksum}   Which seems to both give you the login creation form and of course presents it as a normal page with normal menus etc which helps new users to the site.

I'm not savvy enough to know why this works, but it does for me and I have seen posts from others in the past struggling with this, so I hope it helps you too.