CiviAuthenticate - 2.6/3.0 (Question Answered)

[nzampella]

I've got CiviAuthenticate 2.6 running on my live site right now under J! v2.5.22 & Civicrm 4.4.5.   I just had someone send me a very irate email as he had an expired membership, and the plugin sent him (correctly I may add) to the membership renewal contribution page.

So far so good, all his information is preloaded. However, there is a Joomla account signup block displayed, and so he's filling out the block, and getting an "existing account" error.

I had thought that the plugin would keep that from appearing as the documentation wiki says:

If you redirect to a contribution page, the page will be prefilled with their contact information and if this page normally requires a Joomla account to be created this will not appear (to avoid the user having to create a new account when they already have one)

Is there an issue with the plugin, or Civicrm 4.4.5 & Joomla??

I'm in the middle of moving the site to J! 3.3.1 locally via WAMPServer, and pulled the code for the 3.0 version of the plugin, which installed there fine.   I'm just wondering if I need to hold off referring an expired membership to the renewal page and just give them a message instead.

FWIW .. in all other situations, the plugin seems to work fine.

Thanks ..

Neil

[lcdweb]

The plugin is working as expected. The confusion is with regard to what is actually happening.

When you use the option to redirect expired contacts to a contrib page, we make use of the CiviCRM checksum capabilities. The checksum is a unique value passed through the URL that let's a Civi page interact with a specific contact record, as if the person were logged in. But the person is not actually logged in. We essentially block the login (since their membership is expired) and use the checksum to give them access to their contact record for the purpose of renewing through a contribution page.

Because the user is not actually logged in, the Civi user account creation block is present (if enabled) on the form.

I recommend you copy the contribution page, copy the profile used in that page, alter your copied profile to disable the user account creation option, and then use that new profile with your copied contribution page. In other words -- create an identical copy of your renewal form but with the user account creation turned off, and then use this page for your CiviAuthenticate expired member option.

[nzampella]

Ah !!

That explains it.   I followed your advice, and copied the page & profile, and turned off the Joomla registration option in the profile. 

Test drove the page, and no registration form, so it should now work.     I have to say, you should add your explanation to the wiki for the plugin, would definitely save a lot of worry for some folks.

Thanks !!

[nzampella]

   Urp ... spoke too soon.

Setup the plugin to point to the Contribution page, and the log on just brings them to the home page, but shows them as being logged in !!     Not a good thing as it allows them access to all the areas that are normally for those with valid memberships.

This is on J!3.3.1, with the v3.0 plugin.    Its the only authentication plugin enabled.

I'm testing with a user I know is expired.   So what should I be looking at to see what is happening?

Thanks.

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Update - helps to do some further reading.    I had the Block Access setting set to NO.  It should be set to YES, and then the plugin will send the expired user to the new contribution page.