CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hello,

which scheduled jobs do I need to have enabled in order to get renewal reminder email to work?

This says you have to have 'Send Scheduled Reminders' enabled:

http://book.civicrm.org/user/current/email/scheduled-reminders/

(Which doesn't actually exist, but presumably it means the 'Scheduled reminders sender' job.) This documentation implies you don't need this:

http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC42/Managing+Scheduled+Jobs

It says process_membership 'Updates membership statuses and optionally sends renewal reminders'.

Also is the reminder_date field in the civicrm_membership table still used with the new scheduled reminder functionality in 4.2? The reason I ask is that I only ever see NULL values in this column. Even after I run the Membership reminder date processor job.

Thanks.

Em.

Just and FYI from the Doc about this

Updates membership statuses and optionally sends renewal reminders

When renewal reminders are sent, the member's reminder date field will be set to NULL in the database and on screen. When the membership is renewed, the field is populated with the updated renewal reminder date.

That is why you are seeing NULL.

The scheduled job runs to see if there are reminder that need to go out.  Thus if a reminder is set to to be sent 90 days before expiration or whatever criteria you set it to then the reminders will only be sent if the criteria is met.  Thus if it is not 90 days before expiration or whatever your case may be set to then the cron job sees this and there is not anything to do.  The cron job just checks to see if any reminders need to be sent based on the criteria you chose when you setup the reminder when compared to the current membership status and end date.  Hope that helps to understand how that job works. It is not enabled by default because you need to setup the criteria first then run job once manually to get current status for each reminder.  Then setup the cron to run however you want and when you invoke the CiviCRM cron URL it will run any cron enabled based on the settings. For instance I set my cron URL to run every 15 minutes but I only set the reminder cron to check daily for reminders to be sent because I don't have a reminder that goes out less than 1 day in advance of the activity.  If you have a reminder scheduled to go out 1 hour before the activity then your reminder cron job would have to be set to check every 15 minutes in that case.  So it is a three step process:

One, setup the reminder and it's criteria for sending the reminder.
Two, setup reminder cron to check for new reminders to be sent every X minutes/hours/days where X represents the time needed to properly send the reminder (make sure it is less than reminder else the criteria won't be true in time to send it)
Three, enable URL or cron script at the hosting level (cPanel for many) so that the server invokes the crons to be ran and checked.

Cron is similar to task scheduler in windows except it doesn't check time against action rather it simply runs every x amount of time and checks each job to see if anything has come up in terms of activity to be performed.  Typically it is recommended/limited by your host that you set a cron to run every 15 minutes max.  That way the server doesn't get bogged down with requests from users while trying to perform scheduled tasks.

Okay a couple quick things. The smarty error is from a logic bound issue or something of that nature from my guess.

First off:

Scheduled Jobs:

• have you enabled and run the Membership status job?
• Membership reminder date job?
• Scheduled reminders sender?

All of those affect the sending out of reminders.  Also you must have an email for any contact that is a primary member else nothing will go out.  I am assuming that the core team thought about this scenario and skips any mailing that doesn't have a good email address much like it addresses email as a whole but with that said you might check for malformed email addresses to the primary contacts.  A simple search should produce a list that you can quickly scan for data entry errors.

Last what is line 1093 of that php file?  That might help to ID the issue as well.

Check your membership setup and see if there is any error with any fields you have.  My only thought is that this error is from parsing the result set that is to be sent a reminder. Such as data type mismatch or some other malformed data.  Sometimes just editing and resaving membership types and price sets can correct weird errors.

Dave/Lobo/MM - Any additional thoughts here?

I'm still not able to get Scheduled Reminders to work reliable for membership renewals. Here's our use case.

We have 3 types of membership. Individual, Family and Discounted.
All membership types have a fixed 1 year period, starting on the 1st of Jan end ending on the 31 of Dec.
We have a grace period of 2 months after the membership end date.

We want to send a renewal reminder to every member that has a membership status of grace. And we want to keep sending them a reminder every two weeks until the grace period ends and their status becomes expired.

That should be pretty easy to setup with Scheduled Reminders shouldn't it? The docs are confusing though. The docs here:

http://book.civicrm.org/user/current/email/scheduled-reminders/

say:

"You can set up emails to be sent out to members based on various characteristics of their membership, including the membership type and status."

but the Scheduled Reminders interface doesn't give me the option to select a specific membership status. It only allows me to select membership types. Is this a bug? And the documentation is correct. Maybe this is why I can't get reminders to work.

Thanks.

Em.

Hi penguintrax,

do you use the Scheduled Reminders functionality for membership renewal reminders then? If so which scheduled jobs do you have enabled? I've got the 'Membership status processor' and 'Scheduled reminders sender' jobs enabled. I think that's all I should need according to the docs. I don't believe I need to run the 'Membership reminder date processor' job as this related to the old (pre 4.2) reminders that are set on a specific membership type. At least that's my understanding. I could be wrong.

I've attached a screenshot of my reminder configuration. Is your setup similar?

Thanks.

Em.

I'm having trouble to get it to send anything at all. You have the 'Membership status processor' and 'Scheduled reminders sender' jobs enabled do you?

Em.