CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

There are lots of questions here but here are a few quick pointers to get you started.  Note:  I assume that you have already set up your payment processor and member types because if you have not you really need to start at the beginning.

1.  Download the CiviCRM Floss Manual and read the sections on CiviContribute & CiviMember.  http://en.flossmanuals.net/_booki/civicrm/civicrm.pdf

2.  First off, understand that there are 2 parts to every membership transaction.  1 part is the membership itself with the member types, member status and start & end dates.  The 2nd part is the payment record.  If you are keying membership transactions manually (i.e., looking up the contact record in CiviCRM and going to their membership tab), you do not need a contribution page for this.  If you key these manually, always create the membership record first and from within this transaction you can choose to record your payment which will create the payment record and (more importantly) link these 2 transactions together.  Of course, in order to key membership records, you must have valid member types set up first.

3.  re: Membership Contribution Page.  I believe that the CiviCRM install already gives you a headstart in creating this but in case it doesn't, start by creating a new contribution page.  I am going to assume this page is strictly for membership registration & payment and that you are not also asking for contributions as well.

4.  Give it a Title and select the contribution type of Member Dues and click continue.

5.  On the Amounts tab, select your Payment Processor from the drop-down and uncheck the "Payment Amounts section enabled".  If you want folks to be able to pay by check, check the "Pay Later option" as well, enter your payment instructions and click Save.

6.  Click in the Memberships tab and check Membership Section Enabled?  This will give you a lot of stuff to enter.  You can skip the title & intro messages for now or enter as you wish.  The most important thing to do here is to select which member types you want to show on this registration page and check the Require Membership Signup box and Save.

7.  Click on the Receipts tab next and enter in your info (self-explanatory).

8.  Now, for the most part, that's all you need to get started, however, we almost always want more info from our members so click on the Profiles tab last and select a custom profile (which you will have to have created previously) with all of the member profile fields & questions for the member.  I would include this on the top of the page as the Billing info will show up at the bottom of the page.  Click Save and Done.

9.  To test out your form in test mode, find the Links option to the right of your newly created page and choose Test-drive.  This will allow you to create test transactions so you can see how it works.

That's all you need to setup a membership signup & registration page!

RE: Additional Questions.

In order for memberships to work properly, i.e., change their status when they move into a grace period or expire, etc. AND for the Renewal email reminders to be sent you must setup a cron job to run the UpdateMembershipRecord.php script which is found in sites/all/modules/civicrm/bin  This script should be run once a day.
You can read more about other useful scripts here.  http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC40/Command-line+Script+Configuration

Hope this was helpful.