CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

• My membership scenario is that we are a consortium of organizations (learning institutions) participating in a similar endeavor.  The membership process would be representative from the organization must submit an "application" including some details about the institution as well as the contact information for the primary contact (usually themselves).  I see a possible path by linking an organization profile to an individual profile, although with current code the relationship would have to be set manually, correct?.
• I am not clear on the usefulness of CiviMember outside of paid memberships.  Would CiviMember be appropriate in this case?  Our memberships are free, but do require approval from a committee.
• In the database I see a primary_contact_id in the organization table, but I can't find any information on how you would set that value.  Is this field out of use?  I am aware of the relationship types, and that I can create an employer/employee relationship between individuals and the institutions.  We do need to be able to identify one of possibly several individuals who are from the same institution as the primary contact.  Ideally, we'd like to do this as a part of that application process.  What is the best approach to that?
• Another ideal situation would be to create a queue that new applications go into awaiting approval.  I have already created two groups, Members and Pending, and I understand that I can set a profile to start out in the Pending group.  The weird thing is that in this initial linked "application" they will be creating a new organization contact as well as a new individual contact.  Do I just follow the same procedure for both profiles?  Is there any way to keep them grouped together?
• To get this: a true approval queue where moderators would either approve (changes the group to Members) or reject with some sort of comment to the primary contact asking for follow up info or a rejection reason... I would have to create a custom plugin, correct?  I think you did this with Kabissa but I'm not getting the impression those code changes are public or Joomla compatible.

• I am not clear on the usefulness of CiviMember outside of paid memberships.  Would CiviMember be appropriate in this case?  Our memberships are free, but do require approval from a committee.