CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Why did you change it via phpMyAdmin and not in CiviCRM? Perhaps this datum is stored other places as well, or perhaps saving it executes other aspects of the system. In general, editing the DB directly is not recommended.

I realize now that Set Membership Reminder Dates does not modify any record in which the renewal reminder date is already set.  That posed a problem for me because my client wanted to shorten the Renewal Reminder from 30 to 14 days.  The only option I could see was to find all membership records in which the interval was still 30 days, set those to NULL, and then re-run Set Membership Reminder Dates to reset the interval to 14 days.  And it worked! 

I don't know how complicated it would be to include this functionality in CiviCRM, but I have a hunch there are others who may need to change the value of Renewal Reminder Days after membership records are in place.

Starting with the new 4.2 release, the preferred method for membership reminders is to use the Schedule Reminders feature (Administer > Communications > Schedule Reminders). This feature does not use the renewal_reminder_date value - but rather gives you the ability to set (and modify) any number of reminders that are relative to membership end dates. Hopefully this is a more flexible and less brittle approach :-)

Is this triggered by the "Sent Scheduled Reminders" or "Send Scheduled Mailings" job?  I've sent three memberships in a vanilla 4.2 install inside Joomla 2.5.6 and set them up so that one is expired, and two expire in the next 30-60 days.   I set up reminders to renew based on the expiration dates (before/after with repeat).   Every time I run "Send Scheduled Reminders" I get this:

Parameters parsed (and passed to API method):
a:1:{s:7:"version";i:3;}

Full message:
Finished execution of Send Scheduled Reminders with result: Success (1)

While if I run "Send Scheduled Mailings" I get:

Parameters parsed (and passed to API method):
a:1:{s:7:"version";i:3;}

Full message:
Finished execution of Send Scheduled Mailings with result: Failure, Error message: A fatal error was triggered

How can I investigate or further debug what the fatal error is?  The log states nothing meaningful:

Aug 27 23:43:49  [info] Beginning processQueue run: 0, 0
Aug 28 00:00:34  [info] Beginning processQueue run: 0, 0
Aug 28 00:11:38  [info] Beginning processQueue run: 0, 0
Aug 28 00:13:04  [info] Beginning processQueue run: 0, 0

"Send Scheduled Reminders" is the Job which triggers your Scheduled Reminder items. In your testing - is this working (assuming you're using test email addresses for the memberships that you can monitor)?

I've intentionally made fake accounts with email addresses that all come to me.   None of them receive an email, but if I do a signup I get the confirmation emails, the receipt, etc.   So mail in general is working but the reminders are not despite it stating it was successful.   I think the issue is that the reminder "event" isn't being triggered and somehow I'm not staging the expiration date properly?

Hmm - asked a colleague to retest and it worked for her.

I could not replicate the behavior that you mentioned in the chat.

Here is what I did :

#created a scheduled reminder for type "Student" for  "Renewal Reminder (non-auto-renew memberships only)",
  to send reminder 3 days before the membership end date

#created a membership of type "Student" w/ start date 10 Sep'11, join date 10 Sep'11 and hence end date = 9 Sep'12

#ran the job, I did get the email

Then I retested and it worked for me to - I did it w/ 2 different membership types and set the Scheduled reminder to apply to all of my existing membership types.