Hi Shaun,

There are two ways you can create members - the "preferred" way is to use the built-in ASP.Net membership framework, which by default uses the umbraco membership provider. When you create a member this way, it uses the default member type set in the web.config.

The old and deprecated way to create members was to go directly to the umbraco Members api and call Members.MakeNew();. In fact, that's what the umbraco membership provider is actually doing, and for this reason alone I don't think that it should be marked as deprecated.

So to programmatically create a new Member while specifying a MemberType you could do the following (ripped shamelessly from the umbraco MembershipProvider with a little modification):

// using umbraco.cms.businesslogic.member;
Member m = Member.MakeNew(username, email, MemberType.GetByAlias(memberType));
// Set the password
m.Password = password;

// custom fields - the updateMemberProperty method is a private 
//   helper method found in the MembershipProvider - it simply wraps around m.getProperty()

if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(m_PasswordRetrievalQuestionPropertyTypeAlias))
    updateMemberProperty(m, m_PasswordRetrievalQuestionPropertyTypeAlias, passwordQuestion);
                
if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(m_PasswordRetrievalAnswerPropertyTypeAlias))
    updateMemberProperty(m, m_PasswordRetrievalAnswerPropertyTypeAlias, passwordAnswer);
                
if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(m_ApprovedPropertyTypeAlias))
    updateMemberProperty(m, m_ApprovedPropertyTypeAlias, isApproved);
                
if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(m_LastLoginPropertyTypeAlias)) {
    mUser.LastActivityDate = DateTime.Now;
    updateMemberProperty(m, m_LastLoginPropertyTypeAlias, mUser.LastActivityDate);
}

// save
m.Save();

After that, you could assign the rest of the properties on the member as specified by your chosen member type from whatever form you use to collect the info...

- Rob.