Tracking membership by non-date duration

[Jordanmt]

Hi folks,

I've been playing around in CiviCRM to see if I can build an installation suitable for a magazine. I have known of CiviCRM for some time, and recently came across some blog posts on tackling magazine related challenges like gift subscriptions (mostly about the Australian publication The Monthly and the approaches they undertook).

The one sticking point right now that I am just starting to take a look at is whether or not it would be possible to track membership status by a system of credits (e.g. issues) rather than time (e.g. months). I am working with a publication that does not have a rigid publication timeline, where we may sell a year's subscription as 12 issues, but ultimately publish those 12 issues over 13 months (meaning one of those twelve issues would fall outside the membership duration). That unpredictability makes it difficult to switch to using the start date and end date as a record of who should be receiving a current issue.

I'll be digging into the codebase and documentation to get my mind around this, and I'm happy to get my hands dirty. But if anyone has an insight into how large of a problem this is, or potential ideas around it, please do share!

[Michael McAndrew]

hmmm, I'm trying to think if there are any out of the box CiviCRM objects that have this concept that you could repurpose, i.e. a container that has a fixed number of objects that get used up over time.  Nothing springs to mind I am afraid so I think the solution might have to be an extension.

The membership component would probably be a good place to start since you can easily link it to things like website access based on roles, etc.  You might
* add a price set which represents the number of issues that they purchase with their membership
* record an activity each time a magazine is sent out to a contact
* write code that compares number of issues purchased to number of magazines sent out, and sets status to expired when they have 0 issues left (this might be an extension to the

I'm not sure how you would handle membership end dates (maybe use lifetime) and if you would replace the membership status processor or extend it or what.

Obviously this would not be a trivial extension, and once you get into the details, there might be a fair amount of UI to think about (like ability to show people how many issues they have left, etc) so not a small undertaking but probably a fun one, if you like that sort of thing!

Hope that helps. Others might come up with alternative (simpler?) approaches. Definitley let us know what you decide and how you get on

Michael

[Jordanmt]

Thanks for the detailed reply, Michael. The membership features definitely seem like the right place to build on. This may not be something I jump straight into -- need to build the case -- but the scenario you've outlined sounds like a great jumping board and I'll definitely report back.

[petednz]

Did I see a recent discussion about Recurring Activities? If so, any way that could be wired in so eg creating a Membership creates the Activities, then you use a Smart Group to separate between Members who still have 'scheduled' Activities, and those for whom they are all Completed>

Just some wild thinking there to get my morning started ;-)

[Donald Lobo]

https://civicrm.org/blogs/lindseym/recurring-events-recurring-everything-coming-soon