Once you’ve got your WSSv3 site setup for anonymous access and you’ve configured it for forms authentication you are probably going to want your users to be able to register themselves and start using various features on the site.
You could add the CreateUserWizzard to a page with SharePoint Designer, but I couldn’t find an easy way for users who register with this to have certain roles assigned to them. For example you create a role called registeredUser, and then in WSSv3 give this role contribute access to the whole site. If you just dropped the CreateUserWizzard on the page you’d have to manually go and assign this role to every new user who registered.
To try and make this process easier I’ve created a webpart that adds a CreateUserWizzard control, and hooks up to the CreatedUser event, so it assigns the role to the user as soon as the user registers. Here’s how to use it:
1, Make sure you have correctly implemented anonymous access and forms based authentication on your WSSv3 site. You can do this by reading the SharePoint Team blog:
http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2006/08/16/702010.aspx
or watching Ted Pattisons video on Channel9
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=229709
You’ll also need to add a role of registeredUsers to your membership and roles db (aspnetdb)
Once you have FBA working download the webpart from here.
http://weblog.vb-tech.com/nick/registration.zip
Unzip it. Add the dll to the Global Assembly Cache, and add the following line to the safeControls section of web.config to make the control safe
<SafeControl Assembly="UserWebParts, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=bd6ea4a18b231b6c" Namespace="UserWebParts" TypeName="*" Safe="True" AllowRemoteDesigner="True" />
Save and close web.config. Browse to the page where you want to add the registration control, edit it, get the ‘Advanced webpart gallery’ side bar up, and select to import a webpart
Select the RegistrationWebpart.Webpart file that comes in the zip file along will the webpart dll. The webpart will appear as ‘untitled’ which I need to fix, but just drag and drop it on to the webpart zone that you want it and it appears. Click ‘Exit Edit Mode’ in the top right and you’re ready to go.
One more important thing is to give the role registeredUser contributor rights for the WSSv3 site. Login as the site administrator and go:
Site Actions -> Site Settings -> People and Groups -> New -> Add User
Type registeredUser into the first textbox and press CTRL + K to validate the roles exists. Check that the Contribute option is selected in the drop down and click OK.
Fantastic! Now your site visitors can register for your WSSv3 site and start posting to your discussion boards and other things straight away!
I quickly put this together last night so there’s plenty still to do:
1, Get the webpart to navigate back to default.aspx when the user has registered and clicked the continue button
2, Various webpart settings such as which group to add the users into when they’ve registered
3, Don’t show the webpart if the user is already logged in
4, Wrap it all up into a Feature with a registration page (makes it a nicer install as well!)
5, Look at doing the same for the password reminder control etc…
6, Perhaps look at incorporating registration steps to capture more data.