Customer portal self registration error: “The account associated with this portal has no owner”

Question

I'm working through the tutorial here to enable a Customer Portal for my site:

http://wiki.developerforce.com/index.php/Authenticating_Users_on_Force.com_Sites

As suggested, I got an existing account ID (I used my own account, which is an admin account) and pasted it into my SiteRegisterController, so it looks like this:

public with sharing class SiteRegisterController
{   
     private static Id PORTAL_ACCOUNT_ID = '00590000000aB8l'; // ID of my admin account

     // snip ...
}

But after I fill in all the details and hit siubmit on the self-registration page at /SiteRegister, it responds:

Your request cannot be processed at this time. The site administrator has been alerted.

The account associated with this portal has no owner

The error email that gets sent to me when this occurs says:

Catalog registration accountId parameter value is not valid

How do I fix this?

Answer 1

The problem is that the id 00590000000aB8l is a user id (starts with 005), not an account id (starts with 001). Try creating a new Account (on the Account tab, not in Setup), enabling portals on that Account, and then uses its 001... id instead.