CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I am trying to wrap my head around a problem I am working on a site for a small non profit mountain biking association. We are having issues understanding how to make the renewal process work for us because of the way CiviCRM is integrated with out Wordpress site. Or perhaps we are missing something. I hope it is the latter. We are a small multi chapter non profit and we are trying to use civi CRM as a platform for mountain biking (clubs - chapters throughout the state). We have membership forms for each chapter that have required fields that sign them up for the association and the primary chapter + non required checkboxes that give them the option of becoming members of as many chapters as they would like at the same time. This seems to be working well. Now when a current member comes back and wants to join a additional chapter at a later date during the same membership cycle the required fields are still in place so they are forced to renew the existing membership even though they only want to add an additional membership. Is there some way to fix this? Some kind of rules based validation or perhaps offer a alternate form for renewal . Also we would really like to be able to give current paid up members members additional privileges which means having the users role change in response to there membership status. This does not seem to be a CiviCRM Wordpress feature. Am I missing something? I found and extension that may have done it, but it is apparently broken in 4.4.