Membership status - Pending or Complete?

[groston]

All,

I am puzzled by some seemingly odd behavior with my installation. I created a Contribution for Membership, set up PayPal to accept the payments, etc. I then paid for a membership and this is what I observed:

• The payment went through on the PayPal side
• The CiviCRM log file indicated 'Contribution record updated successfully'
• The Membership dashboard shows the Status as Pending
• When I click view from the dashboard, for the Membership, it shows status as Completed

I don't understand how one screen can show Pending and another show Completed. Did I configure something incorrectly? Any suggestions for getting to the bottom of this?

Thanks.

[groston]

Here is some more information - a screen shot from my contact record which shows two different membership statuses. 

Please help - we want the site to go live shortly, but this issue needs to first be resolved.

[joanne]

The status down the bottom is the contribution status.   This is in agreement with your report that the paypal payment was successful.  (you have received the money)

The status at the top of your screenshot is the membership status.  These are two different things.

I don't know a lot about the pending status as we don't use it.   It usually means that either  the payment is not complete or that approval is required by admin for some part of the process. (used in event registrations mainly I think)

The only thought I have is: "Does your membership form require creation of a drupal account and if so, does that drupal account have to be approved by admin?".  I am not sure that would affect the Civi  membership though.

Edit: One other thought, your contribution amount is $1 .  What is the minimum amount for your membership.  Is it more than $1?

[joanne]

Actually, what you need to do is check your membership status rules. (Administer > CiviMember > membership status rules)

I suspect that one of the following applies:

• Pending has been moved to the top of the list of statuses.  CiviCRM assigns the first valid status to the membership and if Pending is at the top of the table this is the status that will be assigned.
• Both New and Current statuses are set to start at least one day after the member since and/or member start dates. As CiviCRM cannot find a valid membership status higher up than pending  the status is set to that

[groston]

Joanne,

Thank you!! Your solution was spot on. This was the last stumbling block I needed to clear - I think we can go live next week.

With regard to the $1.00 - some people had indicated that the PayPal Sandbox could be problematic, thus I set the cost to $1.00 so I could test without going broke.