CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi,

I'm developing a membership management for a large organisation that has different chapters, organised into districts and regions. An individual person can be a member of many chapters (perhaps up to 20), while in total there are 100s of chapters.

I need to be able to track what chapters a person is a member of. I also need to allow an individual to log in to the system and edit their own details, including what chapters they are a member of. Finally, the membership secretary of each chapter needs to be able to view the contacts of the chapter's members. I have tested ways to implement this ACL requirement using hook_civicrm_aclWhereClause, so I'm not so concerned about this bit.

I've explored many different ways of implementing the ability of a person to edit his/her chapter memberships, but have ended up quite frustrated. Relationships could be used to link people with the chapters that they belong to, but there is no easy way to expose relationship info for editing as part of a profile.

I have looked at memberships, but members only have to pay for membership in the national organisation, there is no cost for membership in each chapter. And given how memberships work, I would have to create a new membership type for every chapter, which doesn't seem feasible or practical.

I have looked at the contact reference custom field type. However, it would need to be a multiple record custom group, since I want to be able to link a person to multiple chapters, with each link being 'equal'. And multiple record custom groups can't be exposed via profiles.

Finally, I can imagine ignoring profiles and instead just having each individual view edit his/her contact record via the main CiviCRM interface. This would get around the limitations of profiles. However, I wouldn't want a member to be able to view his/her contact's notes or tags, I would want the person to just be able to edit his/her own 'core' contact fields and a few custom fields. Is the permissions system really flexible enough to restrict what someone sees at  /civicrm/contact/view (I'm using Drupal and CiviCRM 3.1) to those fields, and to just their own contact record?

I really need to make some progress on the project, and I'm willing to do a bit of coding, but I can't seem to find a way of implementing this functionality that wouldn't involve hundreds or even thousands of lines of custom code.

Any advice on how to approach this would be greatly appreciated, as I'm approaching both wit's end with this one.

Thanks in advance,
-Ian