CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I'm a newbie here, but I have to say that so far, I've been loving Joomla and CiviCRM. However, I'm stuck and would really appreciate some help!

I successfully imported all of our club members into CiviCRM as contacts (first importing households and then importing users to be members of households) and I then created memberships for all of them (I was really frustrated that I couldn't to this at the same time as the previous step, but got it working). So, I now have ~100 households and ~600 members (e.g., full-family, full-single, social-single, student, etc.). I also have a Joomla website.

I'd like the website to work as follows:
Anyone can register to be a user of the site. For those who are not members, they become new contacts in civiCRM and they can sign up for different kinds of mailings

For those who register and ARE official members of our organization, they should get additional access to certain features of our site (e.g., a Members-Only section where they can see a directory, meeting minutes, etc.)

So, my questions are as follows:
1. Is there a way to give a Joomla user name and password for all of my current CiviMembers?
1b. If not, is there a way for people who register as a user of our site through the regular Joomla login for CiviCRM to recognize them as members? I've read that there's some matching going on based on email addresses but I don't know how to check that it is working correctly. I've had a few users register for on our website using the regular Joomla login, and I'm not sure if CiviCRM is recognizing them or matching them or ??
1c. Is there some other method I should be using?

2. How do I restrict access on our front end depending on whether someone is a member, or in a group? The regular Joomla permission levels are SuperUser Registered, etc. How do I link these user levels to CiviCRM membership categories or groups?

I can give you our website URL if that would be helpful.

Thanks so much, this is the final step for us to figure out before we go live.

-stephanie