The way in which we're configuring our site is such that there are two sources of content we'd like to offer the visiting customers; The products, and the blog - set up as what we're calling 'articles'  that only registered users can view.

As you know, for a visitor to purchase a product, they need to register their email and shipping information.  We'd like to offer the articles to regierested users, but not requre that shipping information be populated.

Our goal is to capture the individuals e-mail address without them having to purchase any products.  Additionally, to avoid fake e-mail address, we'd like to send the user interested in the article a confirmation e-mail with a log in password. 

Is there currently a way to set this up and/or configure it?

Thanks :)

 There are a couple of things.

1) Disable address input during user registration.

Log in as admin and go to page <your store URL>/Register.aspx and enable page editor. Click "Edit" in the Register dropdown menu. Check "Hide Billing Address" checkbox. See below image.

2) Active user account via email confirmation

We currently don't have that. As soon as a user registers he becomes active instantly. Let me see if we can squeeze this feature request into the next minor release.

Ok - thank you Luke.

I have split the second item here in the suggestion forum.

Another question regarding this: Would it be possible to remove the security question and answer?  I understand it may be an unusual question, but for the purposes of our site being that not everything is a sellable good, it would make the registraion process a little more streamlined for those just interested in the articles.  If you'd like, I can submit the request as a suggestion / feature request - but my hope is not to wear out my welcome over there <img src="/FCKEditor/editor/images/smiley/msn/confused_smile.gif" alt="" />

This one involves security concern and technical issue. The security question and answer are there to protect from leaking your account to someone who gets your email address. For the technical reason all our customer sites are sharing the same underline code. We cannot change that just for your site. It's also quite a bit of work to make this configurable.