CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi, this is a "best practice" question, I'd appreciate your thoughts.  I've searched in the docs and forum, sorry if I've missed previous info on this. 

We have different membership types for which we'd ideally like to capture different information when users sign up online, e.g. for a student membership, tell us your degree and university; for a concessionary membership tell us whether you are retired or unwaged, etc.  I can imagine a few directions to take:

a) The simple, inelegant solution that I've done so far is to put all the fields on the same profile and label them to be filled in for the appropriate membership type.

b) It would be awesome to have the right fields appear when the user selects the corresponding membership type in the contribution profile, in the way that extra fields appear when they check the box saying 'I am joining on behalf of an organisation'.  Is this actually practical, and how would I go about it? Would it be easier to have these fields on a second profile page, and if so how would that work?

c) Alternatively I could create separate profiles for each membership type, but then how do I dynamically create a master page from which they can select the type (and therefore the profile) they want to proceed with?

These custom fields really relate to memberships, but I've read you can't use membership fields in an online contribution page, so I added them to the individual records.  Is that the right thing to do, or is there a better way?