CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I'm new to CiviCRM and so the answer to this may be very obvious but after reading the guides I can't really understand how to solve my problem. I have a Joomla website for my organisation and I'm trying to use CiviCRM to store details about all our members which we can then use for creating login accounts for the website which match our active membership (ie: ex-members have their Joomla accounts deactivated) and creating mailing lists.

I want to create a custom profile for entering information for new members - name, address, phone, email, payment details, membership type and member number. I also want to allow members who have logged into the site to be able to view and modify their contact details (but not membership type etc), though they should be able to view their membership type and number. If I create a profile with all the required fields then I run up against the problem that mixed field types are not allowed. How can I get round this?

All advice much appreciated.

Thanks for your answer, Donald. Sadly as I'm not a programmer by background it would probably take me quite a while to achieve what I want via the route you suggested. So, I just cheated and created a whole bunch of custom fields which are essentially duplicates of the default CiviCRM Membership fields. However, when I created them I gave them the type of "individual" rather than "membership". That works fine. I just wanted to check, before going ahead, whether there might be a "proper" way to achieve what I'm trying to do which doesn't involve programming.

Tim

PS: From my brief reading about hooks it looks like it might be quite easy to auto-fill the CiviCRM membership fields based on my custom ones, though at this stage I can't quite see the advantage of doing that, at least for what I'm trying to do.