CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi,

I help out at an organization, as membership coordinator and webmaster, where members pay a yearly membership fee.  I currently have a stand alone FOSS software product that I use to track membership, a Joomla based web site, and the ability for people to pay via paypal and google checkout.  I was wondering if it would be possible to import and combine all that in CiviCRM?  It's confusing to correlate the web payments with members sometimes, and time consuming to duplicate the info.

I have downloaded and started to play with CiviCRM on my local MAMP install of my website.  I was able to install the users but ran into some trouble trying to set them up as "members" with the existing beginning and ending dates.  I am NOT looking for help on those specifics yet, I just want to see if I am barking up the right tree.

The important question I can think of now are:

If I manage to get that all imported correctly how do I get EXISTING members the ability to log in and see their status and pay for it? 

Also what is the interface if I need to add people/members manually?  I have a large proportion of members that are much older and don't use and may not own computer? 

And what is the correlation between Joomla users and CiviCRM users? 

Can I add information that I want to collect on users?  I have mailing lists that I want them to select the option to subscribe to. 

That should be a good start.

thanks,
Jason

Hey Jason,

Well done. Do you mind sharing how you did it?

Thanks
Rohit