CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

According to the documentation:
If you want to ensure that memberships last 12 full months by rounding up a partial month (for people who join in the middle of the month), you should select 13 month duration and fixed period.  A user who joins on November 15, 2009 will have a start date of November 1, 2009 and an end date of November 30 2010.

The above is true for a new membership. Renewing this membership while it is still current, however, extends the end date to December 31, 2011 (13 months), which effectively adds an extra month of membership.

The "13 month fixed" duration choice seems to be a special case intended to provide a year-long membership that starts on the 1st of the month and ends on the last day of the same month of the following year. Membership renewal should recognize this case and simply extend the end date by 12 months. That is, you should get the partial month when you join, but not when you renew (because the end date has already been adjusted to provide the full month).

If others agree, I would like to submit the following patch to the function CRM_Member_BAO_MembershipType::getRenewalDatesForMembershipType( ) to recognize this special case.

            if ( $membershipTypeDetails['period_type']   == 'fixed' &&
                 $membershipTypeDetails['duration_unit'] == 'month' &&
                 $membershipTypeDetails['duration_interval'] % 12 == 1 ) {
                // Special case for annual/bi-annual/etc fixed-month memberships. The duration includes an extra month
                // used to round up a partial month on the inital join. Renewals should not include the extra month, so
                // it is removed here. This allows the end date to be extended by an even 12/24/36/etc months without
                // adding an extra month of membership.
                $membershipTypeDetails['duration_interval'] = $membershipTypeDetails['duration_interval'] - 1;
            }


Keen to hear where this got to. A client is wanting the 'sign up during the month and have 12 months + xx days' ie the membership will needing renewing at the end of the 12th full month.

Documentation here http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC41/Membership+Types doesn't seem to have changed - and my testing on a 4.1.2 suggests that the status quo is still that you have to set it to 13 months but the outcome of renewal is then also 13 months.

Is that the case?

Hi Marty - well you have my support - I can't think of an outcome that should have 13 months on renewal when it is meant to be a year.

If someone signs up on the 7th March - and we want them to be a member through till end of March (edit i incorrectly put April here) then the only logical behaviour is what you are doing, giving the person a membership for the whole of the month they are signing up in, plus 12 months, and 12 months thereafter.

If we can't get this in to core without further scenarios being included, then I might just ask for the code so we can apply it in the same way that you are.

Thanks - I will take a look.

Hi Dave - thanks for engaging - yup think i got months confused.

Objective is that signing up part way through a month means they get the remaining days of that month 'free'

So if I sign up on Mar 7 I am purchasing Membership from then through to end of March next year

First Year

Join Date = March 7
Start Date = March 1 (since this is monthly and I expect this is the 'only' option)
End Date = March 30 next year

Second Year

Renewal kicks in = April 1
End Date = March 30

Is this the same behaviour as with Yearly Fixed Period but that we are basically setting the Fixed Period Rollover Day as the last day of the month?

Sounds to me like we are on the same track here - use same approach as with the Yearly rollover but make it based on Day of Month, not Month of Year.

Hi Marty,

We're keen to use your patch in the meantime (before the sort of changes suggested by Dave are implemented).

However, I'm running into some problems with you patch, namely that it seems to be shortening the time period for brand new membership creation to 12 months (eg. if I create the membership on the 7th August, the membership runs from 1 August to 31 July, as opposed to what we'd expect, 1 August - 31 August).

Additionally, if I renew a membership it doesn't appear to me that the section of the function you've patched is being called at all. It looks the patch should be patching getRenewalDatesForMembershipType() instead (though I have no idea where in the that function to place the code!).