CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

We have a number of projects in Civicrm which we would like help with. Some of them may be more involved than others. We have to budget for expenditures, so we have to have an idea of what a project will cost, the length of time involved, and how we can maintain our site after the modifications. Our site is on Joomla 1.7.x and CiviCRM 4.0.x. Our server is hosted by one of our members.

Our group is a large international auto enthusiasts (Corvair) club. The biggest benefit for members is a magazine which is published 9 times/year and snail-mailed to each member.

We allow both members and non-members to access features on our site. Members have full access, so they can use the site's features such as posting a classified ad or accessing the monthly magazine online in PDF format. They can also create a gallery on our site. Site registration people can add their vehicles to the Registry we have online. We hope that the site registration folks see the benefits of membership and join the club.

Membership renewals are generally done by snail mail, as not all of our members have 'net access. We have 4000 members. We helped sponsor the MIH for the Civicrm Membership Upsell. We also have about 120 chapters.

1. Each one of our members has a member id number. Some have had the same one since the club started in 1969. I have setup a custom field in Civicrm for this id. When I imported the data, I mapped the member ID to the External ID. In addition, we have a member validation code also stored as a custom field.

We need to update the custom fields. I thought about using a Mysql trigger to update them, but simply did not have the time to implement it. The validation code is a random number (more about it later), seven digits long. The member ID is the same number as the id in the civicrm_member table.

If for some reason it is better to use the external_identifier, then let's do that, but whatever we use needs to be exposed on the back end because we use it do retrieve member records.

2. We have about 120 chapters around the world. Each chapter has its own membership list. Many chapter members are members of the International club, but some are not. We want to keep track of all of the chapter members and let one or two admins from each chapter have access to their chapter members records.

Additionally, if there was an easy way to collect dues on behalf of each chapter, that would be a plus, but we would need to be able to generate a report, so that we could reimburse each chapter for the dues we collected on their behalf.

Also, the chapters are assessed a fee to cover the costs of providing services their members who are not members of the international club.

3. We need a way for current members to register for the site. We would like to use their member ID and the validation code so they can verify they are who they say they are before giving them access to the member's benefits on the site. Once they enter their ID and validation code, then they would be able to create an account.

Please contact me if you are available to do take on new project and have skills in both CiviCRM (latest versions) and Joomla 1.7.x+.