CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Perhaps neither Pat nor I have explained our needs sufficiently.  We are actually not looking to upsell membership types, rather for the ability to offer a range of prices for the same membership benefits depending on the person's circumstances.

We are an not-for-profit that supports and promotes breastfeeding.  One of our membership types, lets call it XYZ membership provides access to a range of services and discounts.  We have always had 3 prices associated with the XYZ membership in our country.  A twelve month (currently $65), a 12 month concession price for those who are eligible for government low-income benefits (currently $50) and a 24 month price (currently $95).  We also have prices for overseas subscriptions (more expensive because postage is more expensive - one membership benefit is a paper-copy magazine) This combination of prices works for us and for our members.  It just doesn't work with standard CiviCRM. 

We don't want low-income earners stigmatised by having their own membership type and we want to encourage members to join for more that 12 months so that they might 'fall in love' with us and become active volunteers who provide the majority of the services we offer (Some do and are members for many years).

My original thought was that we needed Price Sets to work with membership (I have noticed this has been a suggestion/request by other forum posters). People could choose to use price sets or not. I don't know how complicated it would be to extend price sets to memberships. 

Pat's idea to tie in the renewal start date and the current membership end date would also work but as has been pointed out, not everyone would want to have it work that way for all membership types (we certainly wouldn't, as we offer other membership types that can run concurrently with the XYZ membership.)

I suppose the membership setup page would need to have a check box such as "This membership type shares start and end dates with other memberships"  If you ticked it, an additional table would appear where you could list the other membership types for which 'current membership end date = renewal start date' will apply - but perhaps this is starting to sound like price sets for membership? 

Interesting idea. So users can subscribe and renew their memberships, but the membership types are hidden? I would love more information on how you do this - it could be the answer we are looking for.

I drafted a wiki page to talk through these items:
http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/Membership+-+Multiple+type+signup+and+alternate+calculations

Regarding "renewal vs. initial signup rates" - it sounds like you're introducing an additional concept to the ones already on the table... the option to set a different fee for renewing a given membership type than the "signup" fee. I'm not quite sure how this ties in to the issue of how the start date for a renewal is determined (today vs. end of current membership).

In any case, fee adjustments for renewals (and potentially for other conditions like a URL parameter from a referring page, some property of a contact etc. ) can potentially be done using the "membershipTypeValues" hook. This hook allows you to modify membership types / fees on a contribution page programmatically.

http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMUPCOMING/CiviCRM+hook+specification#CiviCRMhookspecification-hookcivicrmmembershipTypeValues

So the code in your hook implementation could detect a renewal situation and automatically modify the fees. Refer to the Extending CiviCRM - Hooks section in our online book for more info on using hooks:

http://en.flossmanuals.net/CiviCRM/DevelopHooks

I have had a look at this: http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/CiviCRM+hook+specification#CiviCRMhookspecification-hookcivicrmbuildAmount

It seems that you can modify the contribution but not the membership dues. Is there any way this is possible?

Interestingly, I found what looks like where the start dates are defined: ContributionPage.php, about line 216:
            if ( CRM_Utils_Array::value( 'start_date', $defaults ) ) {
                list( $defaults['start_date'], $defaults['start_date_time'] ) = CRM_Utils_Date::setDateDefaults( $defaults['start_date'] );
            }
I haven't been able to figure out where $defaults comes from... Is it possible that if I change this value, it would make new memberships start from that date. I am thinking that I can create a module which looks up the members current membership expiry date, and uses that. Obviously this won't work for everyone, but it would work nicely for us. There are a lot of other things to look at too, but this seems to be a decent place to start.

Pat - As Brian noted, you'll want to use membershipTypeValue hook to modify the membership types and associated fees. I discussed the issue of using a hook to modify the default behavior for assigning start_date to a membership - and lobo agreed that you could potentially use the 'post' hook. This hook is fired on a DB operation - so in this case you'd trap inserts on membership records. Hopefully you could ascertain if there's already an existing current membership for that contact and if so, update the newly inserted membership with corrected start and end dates (based on the end_date of the existing membership).

The snippet you've referenced above is actually setting defaults for Pledge behavior. If you want to follow the code which currently handles the online membership renewal, start at:
CRM/Contribute/Form/Contribution/Confirm.php line 513 (in v3.2) which calls
CRM_Member_BAO_Membership::postProcessMembership which uses
CRM_Member_BAO_Membership::renewMembership to handle renewal logic

Super! I used this code (in a drupal module) to alter the renewal price:

function membershipRenewal_civicrm_membershipTypeValues( &$form, &$membershipTypeValues ) {
    for ($i=0; $i < count($membershipTypeValues); $i++) {
      if ($membershipTypeValues[$i]['name'] == '12 month Australian') {
          $membershipTypeValues[$i]['minimum_fee'] = "50";
      }
      if ($membershipTypeValues[$i]['name'] == '24 month Australian') {
          $membershipTypeValues[$i]['minimum_fee'] = "95";
      }
      if ($membershipTypeValues[$i]['name'] == '12 month Concession') {
          $membershipTypeValues[$i]['minimum_fee'] = "35";
      }
    }
       
}
Next step is to create a module UI so admin can set the renewal rates for each subscription... Then I will start looking at the start_date changes...

Am I approaching this the right way? It strikes me that this is using Drupal to do what seems to be CiviCRM's job...? Is it possible to use hooks from within CiviCRM?

Thanks for the help on this guys - this is one of the best support forums for any open source project I've dealt with!!