We are in the process of switching a database of several thousand contacts to CiviCRM. We have a legacy Wordpress site, so we have CiviCRM nicely integrated in. We are about to go live. We don't want to force ALL our existing contacts to become Wordpress users, but as they renew memberships, give donations, sign up for events, we want to give them the option to register as a Wordpress user (Subscriber - we currently have 0 Wordpress Subscribers and a handful of WP Administrators). We are only requiring email and password to register. How do I get the new registrant to automatically either (1) become a new contact if the email is not in the CiviCRM contacts or; (2) simply assign the login to the right CiviCRM contact when the email matches? We can register new Wordpress users and run "Synchronize Users to Contacts" which works as desired, but we don't want to run the manual step. When they register the first time on Wordpress, we want the Contact relationship established immediately, so that they will be logged in and then can do the kinds of things we want our CiviCRM members and donors to do online.
Thanks for any help - we're pretty new at CiviCRM, really like it, but are still coming up to speed.