Define the user permission level upon registration in the Global Configuration.

On a site using user Article Submissions it can be helpful to give the user "Author" permission when they register.

By default users are assigned the "registered" permission which does not allow them to submit Articles.

The site admin would manually assign the user front-end Author permissions (or above: editor, publisher) in the User Manager.

This could become tedious.

To set the permission level that new registered users will be assigned go to:

Site > Global Configuration [Site].

Set New User Registration Type to the desired level.

This is a new feature in Joomla 1.5 which used to require a core hack in Joomla 1.0.