CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

sbrawner -- I *think* you're misunderstanding the function. (or I am)

that function allows you to create a joomla user *as part of* a profile. So, for instance, you can disable the user registration option in Joomla and require joomla user registrants to do so through a CiviCRM profile. the option for enabling that is in the profile advanced settings section. this allows you to only make the joomla user registration available as part of a membership signup, for example.

re: your earlier post about how to import/automate creation of a joomla account for all existing civicrm contacts, here are some things that I've done to accomplish this in the past:

1) export my list of contacts for which I want corresponding joomla user accounts created (this may be all your civicrm contacts, or just a subset)

2) pull the list into Excel and create default usernames/pwds for the users. I typically use first initial + last name for the username, and use their five digit zip for the pwd. I find that to be a moderately safe way of generating defaults, while easily letting people know what their default info is (I encourage them to login and change the info).

3) ensure there are no duplicate emails in my result set. this can actually be done before export from within CiviCRM (alter the duplicate checking criteria and run a dup check). this is important because CiviCRM doesn't connect the jos_user to the civicrm_contact until the user actually accesses a civicrm page, and the basis upon which the connection is built is their email address. if you have duplicate emails in either civicrm or joomla, it WILL screw up and mis-connect users. (sidenote -- I'd love a way for CiviCRM to either provide a warning or strictly prevent duplicate emails; OR, it might be good if CiviCRM has a holding vault for questionable/duplicate connections, where an admin can go in, see joomla users/civicrm contacts that are potential matches, and manually connect them; the current system is vulnerable to misconnections)

4) use a Joomla extension to import your list of civicrm contacts with their newly created default username/pwd into joomla as users.

Brightcode Import: http://extensions.joomla.org/component/option,com_mtree/task,viewlink/link_id,2826/Itemid,35/
I have an earlier version of this (before it went commercial) that was only J1.0 compatible. It works pretty well. Does what it's supposed to. I still use it for J1.5 sites -- I just import using this tool on my local sandbox, then export the jos_users table and import into my live 1.5 site. JED says this is 1.5 compatible now, but I haven't used that version.

To my knowledge, this is the only extension utility currently available to handle this import. There's another one listed in JED but I've tried to contact the developer to acquire it in the past and have had no luck.


Given the multiple steps and sensitivity of the procedure, it's definitely something I would recommend testing on a local sandbox before doing on your live server. Also, make sure you backup the jos_users table before going through these steps.

The reason I think you would have difficulty (though not impossible) running a script to go directly from CiviCRM to jos_users is that in J1.0.13+ (including 1.5) they enhanced the encryption mechanism for the user passwords. Basically it adds a seed string to the users pwd and then runs the MD5 hash on that. You'd need to do some homework on how that mechanism works before trying to go directly from CiviCRM to jos_users table (not saying it can't be done, it's just not a 1-2-3 process).

-Brian