In the previous section of this chapter, we already briefly touched upon the Customer Configuration section of Magento, located at System | Configuration | Customer Configuration. Magento allows a lot of fine-tuning in the way your store is set up. Because of that there are many different configuration sections for each part of Magento, including customer account management. We will only describe the settings we believe are important to think about when starting with your store.
When you click on the Create New Account Options section, a relatively big group of settings appears. Some of those are the following:
- Default Email Domain: This is the domain that shows us the example domain in various parts of your website.
- Default Welcome Email: This is the e-mail template that is used when sending your customers the welcome e-mail after they have registered on your website.
- Require Emails Confirmation: Whether or not to require confirmation by new customers that they really want to create the account on your website. If this is disabled, anybody can make an account for any e-mail address and it will be active immediately.
- Confirmation Link Email: This is the e-mail template used when sending the account confirmation link.
- Welcome Email: As the small note below the input field says, this e-mail template is used instead of the Default Welcome Email, if e-mail confirmation for new customer accounts is necessary.
In the Password Options section, you can set the templates to e-mail the customer when he or she requests a new password (Forgot Email Template) and also for the actual password reminder (Remind Email Template). For the security of your customers' information, it is very important that you make your own Remind Email Template and set it here. Magento's default password reminder e-mail contains customers' passwords in text format. Because e-mail is an unsafe medium, if you do not edit this e-mail template all passwords sent through password reminders can be intercepted! The same goes for the welcome e-mails that are sent after a customer registers on an account. Magento also sends passwords in those e-mails and they should be changed.
In the Name and Address Options section, there are some relatively straightforward settings like how many address lines a customer can use, if customer properties such as gender and date of birth are required to be filled in, and whether to use prefixes and suffixes along with customer names.
