Question about text in documentation about memberships: only one membership?

[Sebastiaan Spykstra]

Hello,

I'm currently involved in the implementation of CiviCRM with an organisation that has multiple types of membership.
In practice it is possible to assign contacts multiple memberships of the same organisation and even the same type of membership multiple times.
However, in the documentation the following is mentioned:

As mentioned above, CiviMember treats each membership as membership of an organisation. A contact can only have one active membership with an organisation at even given time.
See: http://book.civicrm.org/user/current/membership/what-you-need-to-know/

And also:

Remember that a contact can only have one membership for an organisation at any given time.  You will need to create a "dummy" organisation to link to one of the membership types if you contacts can have concurrent memberships.
See: http://book.civicrm.org/user/current/membership/setup/

As said, in practice it is possible to assign multiple memberships and as far as we can see this doesn't have any consequences in Civic, thus far.
The concern is that there might be a reason for explicitly mentioning this in the Civic documentation. Does anyone have any insight on this subject?

Thanks in advance for any reactions.

[joanne]

Actually there is a conditional statement (shown in bold) missing from the documentation.

As mentioned above, CiviMember treats each membership as membership of an organisation. When contacts can sign up or renew online a contact can only have one active membership with an organisation at even given time.

And also:

Remember that if you offer online sign ups and renewals a contact can only have one membership for an organisation at any given time.  You will need to create a "dummy" organisation to link to one of the membership types if you contacts can have concurrent memberships.

If you are only going to add memberships manually through the backend then you might never encounter any problems, but if you ever think you might want to offer online sign ups or renewals then you need to make sure you define your membership types to fit with the concept of "one active membership per organisation" .

[Sebastiaan Spykstra]

Hi Joanne,

Thank you for the reaction and explanation. I can see that online signups are limited, so I'll make sure we will take that into consideration.
Thanks again for your reply!