CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi,

We've been using CiviCRM for a few years, but about a year ago started offering members-only content on our site and so needed to run the UpdateMembershipRecord.php script regularly to update membership status when memberships expire. But our shared host didn't permit setting up a cron task, so we wrapped the script in a module that attached it to the Drupal cron run (which was then fired by the Drupal Poormanscron module). Then we started running into timeout issues during the script execution (we have a couple thousand members), and again, our shared host wouldn't let us try to tune PHP/MySQL, so we hacked the script a bit to spread updates out over a settable number of runs, rather than trying to update them all at once. And then our local administration didn't want the automatic sending of renewal emails, so we added an option to turn renewal emails on/off independently of everything else. And for assorted troubleshooting, it would be nice to be able to fire a manual synchronization and to see when the last one was fired and how long it took, so we added that to the module, too.

We recently upgraded Civi to 3.4 and went back and upgraded our pet module (which we call CiviMember Status Update) to use the 3.4-vintage UpdateMembershipRecord.php script, and it's now running on our site. (The old module did its thing properly for a year or two prior to the upgrade. New version has been purring along for a few days.) It occurs to us that others might find this module useful, particularly as a companion to the CiviMember Roles Sync module (which also attaches its functionality to Drupal cron, and which we also use). So we'd like to make it more generally available (yay open source), but are not entirely sure about the best way to do that. Creating a project page on Drupal.org looks like a possibility. Any further suggestions/recommendations?

Thanks,

Robert

P.S. Prior to any more formal release, if anyone would like to try it out, contact me and I'll email it to you.

OK. We've never done that before (and we're all part-timers here), so it will be a learning experience, I'm sure!

Robert