CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hello,

Our site has two types of memberships: one that's free of charge, and one that requires a donation. I have created a form with CiviContribute that uses a profile that collects information and signs a user up as a Joomla user while creating that person's CiviCRM contact. The form works quite well, as someone can sign up for our site as a paid member. However, when I try to create a free user, the form will not process because the form will not create a user or a CiviCRM contact when I hit the "Confirm Contribution" button. Instead, the page will refresh, and will display the same registration form with all the same information in the same fields. When I first created this form, both types of memberships worked, but more recently, that hasn't been the case. ReCaptcha is enabled in this form, but whenever there is some issue with the data entered in any required field, CiviCRM will return the correct error message to the end user.

The form only collects member dues, not any other type of donation. I have created three user groups (one for system admins, one for paid users, and one for free users) and three corresponding CiviCRM memberships. The free membership is a lifetime membership, while the paid membership has a rolling time period of one year. CiviCRM's authentication plug-in is also the only authentication plug-in enabled on the site. Under "Membership Type Access Control" in this plug-in, Membership Type ACL features are enabled, and all membership types are set to correspond to the correct Joomla ACL group. Membership Status ACL features are also enabled, with each membership status set to a corresponding Joomla ACL group that in a manner consistent with our current plan for handling memberships. I also created an ACL role in CiviCRM allowing everyone to create a profile in "Members," the profile we are using to collect all user data.

We have noticed that when we disable the execution of real-time monetary transactions in the "Amounts" section, a free membership can be created, but since we are using Paypal to manage the transactions for our membership dues, a user can't sign up as a paid member.

I apologize if this is in the wrong forum. This registration form involves several aspects of CiviCRM, and it's difficult to determine exaclty where the problem is coming from.

May we please have some help with this? I am at a loss as to what's wrong. I'm pretty familiar with Joomla, but I'm less experienced in CiviCRM and know very little PHP. However, I am technically inclined and will be willing to learn. I'm aware that Joomla 1.6 is an unsupported version of the CMS, but getting this project done is urgent, and we can't take the time to upgrade right now. Any suggestions for a good workaround or any solution will be greatly appreciated. Thank you for your willingness to help us out with this problem.

Thank you for the help. I upgraded my development site (which runs Joomla 2.5 and had been having the same issue) from CiviCRM 4.1.5 to 4.2. The database wouldn't upgrade because the PHP version was out-of-date, and so I upgraded the PHP to version 5.4.5, reinstalled CiviCRM and ran the database upgrade utility again. This time, it worked like a charm, but now when I try to view contribution pages on the front end, the server returns a 500 error. Any suggestions to get the contribution page to display? The development site (aside from the changes and upgrades I mentioned) has the same specs as the live site.

I apologize for bumping this topic, but I finally found a solution to the problem!  For whatever reason, when I downgraded the server's version of PHP to version 5.3.16 (while trying to find the solution to another problem with a Joomla plugin unrelated to CiviCRM), CiviCRM's forms would display properly on the front end and would process test payments with no problems. I don't know what about PHP 5.4 was causing problems for CiviCRM, but do any of you know if there are any other possible compatibility issues between CiviCRM and PHP 5.4? If there are, I would be willing to bring that up to the developers if no one else has.