Public registration with the matching theme

New families need a way in. With the matching theme installed, your site gets a public registration flow; the theme provides the pages and form, and the plugin does the account creation underneath with the same care as everything else.

What a new family can register as

Two shapes, matching the account model:

• Independent student: one account, their own email and password. For adult members.
• Parent or guardian: a parent account with a real email, plus their child created as a parent-managed student (no login of their own), linked from the moment of creation. The parent's name, relationship and mobile are written straight into the child's protected profile fields, encrypted like everything sensitive.

The safety properties

Worth knowing, because self-registration is where a lesser system grows holes:

• The set-password email only goes out once the *whole* registration has succeeded; if creating or linking the child fails, every account created by that attempt is rolled back. No half-registered families to clean up.
• Public registration can create and link only its own brand-new records. It can never attach an existing account, so nobody can claim someone else's child by typing the right name; existing records are linked only by your office (Linking parents and children).
• New members meet the photo consent step at first sign-in like everyone else, and profile completeness still gates online booking, so self-registered families end up exactly as complete as office-created ones.

Without the matching theme

There's no plugin-provided public registration form; that's deliberate, since a form is exactly the kind of thing sites want in their own design. Your options: use the matching theme; have your web designer build a form on the plugin's registration bridge (documented in For Developers); or run office-created accounts only, which plenty of clubs prefer anyway; families ask, you create (Add new students).