CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I have membership and other contact records all imported into CiviCRM as contacts

Henry Bennet has created a Joomla plugin that restricts logins to only people with valid memberships in CiviMember - this will be very useful once I can figure out how to expose and edit CiviMember details on the front-end (eg through profile forms) - currently I am using custom fields instead of CiviMember.

The next problem is to replace the standard Joomla register form with one which checks whether the person registering is an existing contact (and optionally a member of a specified group) before allowing them to register. (in the future this could be extended to check CiviMember status as Henry has done, but for now all contacts who are members are in a group called 'all members' so I just check whether the match is a member of that group). If no matching member is found in Civi it tells them to go away and join.

I have this working as a J1.5 component extension com_civiuser. The last step I am having trouble with is creating a new entry in civicrm_uf_match and any other links necessary. I don't want to create a new contact which seems to be the action of  the functions in UFMatch.php.
I have already found the contact matching firstname,lastname and email and have the contact_id, and I have just created the Joomla user and so have the Joomla user id.

Is it simply a question of inserting a new row in civicrm_uf_match with the two id's and the email address in uf_name (which seems to be what is in the existing entries)?

Why is email address stored here (civicrm_uf_match) as well as in the contact details (and the Joomla user details)?

Should the domain_id field ever be anything other than 1?

Secondary question - since I am replacing the standard Joomla user details editing form it would be relatively easy to automatically update the CiviCRM contact record if they change their email address using api civicrm_contact_add passing in the civi contact id.

Will this function also update the email address in the civicrm_uf_match table as well - and if not what are the implications of having a non-matching email address in that table?

RogerCO