This help file is intended to provide you with a broad overview of creating and managing Interactive User profiles on your Tendenci website. We've included a section with tips for your users to refer to and learn how to manage their profiles. As you read through the guide, you'll find references to other Tendenci Help Files and training materials that talk about different User and Member management features included with all Tendenci websites. 

PART 1 - Introduction to Interactive Users

Interactive Users consist of Staff, Super Users, Registered Users, Members, and anyone else with a login username and password. 

Tendenci determines if a site visitor is an Interactive User if that person can log into your website with a username and password. Your site may also have non-Interactive Users included in user searches. These users most likely have had some previous interaction with your website, such as making a donation on your site, attending an event, or filling out a contact form. Tendenci saves the details about these site visitors to help you build your constituent lists but they won't have the ability to login and make changes to site content, including their user profile information.

Here are 3 Reasons Why You Might Want to Give Site Visitors Interactive Accounts: 

1. Save you and your staff time by having Users manage their contact information and profile themselves
2. Build your online community by offering Interactive Users special access to content and event pricing when they register
3. Generate Reports that tell you which Users are the most engaged with your organization

In addition to your site visitors, you'll also need to give Interactive accounts to anyone who will be accessing and changing the information on your website. The number of people who need interactive accounts varies from association to association, and can include people like:

• You and Your Staff
• Your Board Members
• Committee Chairs
• Members
• Volunteers

Add New Users

You have several choices on how you'd like to create new Interactive Users. These choices give you full control and automation for managing user registrations. 

Here are the 4 primary methods for creating interactive users on your site:

1. Admin can manually add individual new users
2. Batch Import Users
3. Join Under a Membership or Corporate Membership
4. Enable Self Registration

We'll briefly talk about the first two methods in this section, and you'll find more information about the third option, Enable Self Registration, in the next section of this Guide. 

Manually Add New Interactive Users

Anyone at your Association with Super User access to your Tendenci website can manually add new Interactive Users. 

Check out the help file "Add a New User to Your Tendenci Website" which walks you through the steps to manually add new Users to your website. In section F of the form, you'll want to make sure you set the User to Interactive, and create a username and temporary password so the new user can login to their account. 

Batch Import Users

You can batch import a .CSV file with the list of people you'd like to add as Interactive users on your website. Follow along with this help file that shows you how to "Import Users to Your Tendenci Website" to learn how to batch import your Users and make them Interactive. 

Join Under a Membership or Corporate Membership Application

When a site visitor joins your membership program, they are automatically set up with an Interactive User account once their membership has been approved. This applies to corporate memberships as well as individual memberships. 

You can also check out our On-Demand Introduction to Memberships course below.

This course includes slides demonstrating some of the features inside Tendenci's Memberships Module:

In the next section, we'll talk about the third option for adding interactive users to your website using Self Registration. 

PART 2 - Enable the Self-Registration Function in User Settings

The Self Registration Feature allows site visitors to complete a short registration form, confirm their account through an email verification process, and generate their own username and password to your site. This feature is optional and gives you a way to automate the registration approval process for visitors who want to become more involved in your Association's activities. 

1) Navigate to your Users Settings from your black admin bar or in your browser navigate to https://yoursite.com/settings/module/users/.

2) On the Users Settings screen, scroll down through the settings until you find one labeled "Self Registration:" 

3) Make sure the Self-Registration option is set to true. This will allow site visitors to register on your website, giving them login privileges so they can contribute content, keep their profiles up-to-date, and maintain an identity on your website to help you and your Association team develop stronger relationships with your online constituents. 

4) Once Self Registration is enabled, you can now go to the account registration form to link to from your navigation menu or from another page. Typically, the URL for this form will be http://yoursite.com/accounts/register where you'll add "/accounts/register" to the end of your own website's URL. 

When you enable Self Registration, site visitors who aren't logged in will see an option on the Login Page to Register for a new account below the password reset options. If you have Self Registration disabled, the option to Register won't be on the login form:

Visitors will see an Option to Register for a New Account with Self Registration	Without Self Registration enabled, the new account option won't appear

Self Registration is a great option for Associations that want to attract new online constituents and gives you a way to automate user account creation, without having to manage a full membership program. 

PART 3 - Making a Contact an Interactive User

Sometimes you will have existing Users on your site that don't have Interactive logins and you want to upgrade their access. It's pretty easy to give a User an Interactive login.

First, find the User Profile that you'd like to give login privileges and click to "edit" the profile. 

Next, Scroll down their profile to Section F) Login Information. 

Section F on the User Profile Edit View has Interactive User Options

Then, fill out a Username and change the dropdown option from Not Interactive (no login) to Interactive. Click the "Change Password" link underneath the Username to create a temporary password. Super Users can change the passwords of any User by editing their profile and clicking the change password link in Section F or by creating an auto-generated password. 

It takes just a Minute to create temporary passwords or an auto-generated password as a Super User for Users who've forgotten their Password!

Here's a short video that demonstrates the process of editing a User Profile and changing the login information:

In the next section of this guide, we'll talk about Upgrading an Interactive Users permissions level to give your users more options to collaborate on your site and engage with your Association. 

PART 4 - Upgrading a Users Permissions Level

Oftentimes, you'll find that you have a User or Member who is promoted to your Board or becomes more involved in your Association in some way that they require greater access to modules on your site. 

Here are just a few reasons that you might need to promote a User:

• A Member is elected to run a committee such as Memberships or Events
• A current Donor joins your Board
• A new Staff member was already a registered User on your site
• A Volunteer needs access to add content, such as event photos, to your site

There are 3 ways that you can give a User additional permissions to your site: 

1. Change their Security Level from User to  Superuser
2. Individually promote a User's permissions levels for modules
3. Add them to a User Group with promoted permissions 

When we talk about "promoted" permissions, we're talking about the highly customizable permission settings that give a user access to your site's modules on an individual basis. You can learn more about promoted permissions options in this Help File on Site Wide Permissions Control Settings. The help file also discusses how to edit the User's Security level. 

Promoted Permissions How-To

Watch this video to see how to change an individual user's permissions access: 

In the next section, we'll share some best practices and tips for advanced User management options included with Tendenci. This will include ways to customize User Registration templates for those of you with design and/or web development experience. 

PART 5 - Advanced User Options

The basic user registration feature comes with a standard sign-up form template, and gives you a way to allow your site visitors to login and perform various activities on your site depending on the permissions you give them. Most of the advanced user management tools are exclusively available for your members through the Memberships module. We recommend that you use the memberships module if you want to give your site users interactive logins plus use advanced user management tools such as: 

• auto email notifications are sent to Users based on join dates
• renewal and expiration management tools 
• advanced reporting on User Activity
• Custom fields on the registration form
• paid user accounts 

User Registration Form Modifications

To customize the basic registration form, you'll go into the Theme Editor and look for the "customize more templates" option on the lower right side of the editor. Find the template inside accounts can customize the registration form using CSS and HTML plus Django template tags to style the form any way you'd like. This is a fairly simple task for anyone familiar with HTML and CSS. The Django template tags are easy to insert without any knowledge of Python.

Open up the Registration Form HTML template in your theme editor and add custom text and images using HTML/CSS and Django Template Tags. In this screenshot, I've added a new <p> block of text beneath the <h2> text. 

The {% trans %} tag is a Django template tag that tells web browsers to translate the text inside the {% %} into the User's default language. These tags are important if you have an international audience. 

A Screenshot of the Theme Editor while Editing the Registration Form template.

Merge Similar Users

If you have multiple users accounts for the same people, you can use the Merge Similar Users function to remove duplicate accounts and merge them into one profile. 

Customize the Login Landing Page 

By default, users are directed to their individual profiles after they login, but you can quickly change the page that users are first directed to when they login inside your Site's General Settings.

To find and make changes to your Global Site Settings, refer to this help file: https://tendenci.com/help-files/tendencis-global-site-settings-definitions/. Scroll down through your site settings to find the setting called "Profile Redirect" and enter the custom URL that you want users to be taken to each time they login.  

Here's a screenshot with the Profile Redirect highlighted in blue:

The Profile Redirect setting lets you choose where users are taken after logging in.

Users with a site login can edit their own profiles to keep their information up-to-date, view their Memberships and Groups, and find invoices to print receipts and pay outstanding balances. Here's a collection of help files and videos that show you and your users how to edit and manage their online profiles on your Tendenci website. 

This video demonstrates how to edit and view a user profile: 

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