CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

hi folks,

i've tried to research to make sure this isn't a duplicate issue already thoroughly discussed elsewhere, but please point me if i've missed anything.

civimember assumes that membership types will have a uniform membership fee.  however, in our use environment we have a very wide variety of (self-selected) membership levels.  we considered trying to create a very large number of memberships types with adequately fine-grained fee levels, but that proved ungainly.

so right now, we simply have "monthly" or "annual" memberships.  what we'd like is to be able to easily and quickly see the contribution level associated with the membership for each member.  the following 2.1 fix addresses part of that issue: http://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-2984 .  it will allow exports into csv to show the related contribution levels.  but it would be very valuable to see this on the display.

my initial thought was to create custom data linked to the civimember record, ie. "membership fee level".  right now, that doesn't seem possible, but would that be difficult to allow?  then, ideally that custom data would be displayed on the main display table, as well as the drill-down focus page.  alternatively, without creating a new field one could display "most recent membership contribution" on the main display table.  that wouldn't address any issue where someone has promised one amount but is only contributing another, but it would still be useful.

of course, this links to the question of how easy it is to customize fields displayed in the summary view, which is a major usability issue for us (performance issues make drill-down expensive, so the more displayed on one page the better).

so, to summarize:

1) has there been thought, and would it be easy, to make custom data able to attach to civimember records?

2) would it make sense to make "membership level" a standard field on civimember records?

3) how would one make such (custom) data display on the main table?

4) if not custom data, would it be easy to display "most recent linked contribution amount" on main table?

thanks!
.b

responses, again in numerical order.

1.  oh my, mea culpa.  not at all sure how i missed this.  thanks, and it works perfectly.

2. by "level" i was meaning dollar amount.  the issue is that there is a minimum dollar level associated with any membership type, but in our case this is frequently exceeded, which is critical information.  what you're saying, i think, is that the dollar amount is stored as each payment that is actually received linked to that membership.  now, that could possibly be different from what was pledged, thus the custom data above, but i agree that it's generally the same.  so if we could access that info more effectively, our issue would be addressed.

3. re: displaying custom data in main screen, this brings up perhaps our organization's largest challenge, which is how to get more useful information displayed on summary screens that display information for many contacts/memberships/etc.  (this is in part because performance issues make drill-downs very time-consuming, and in part because end-users like seeing comparison information for multiple entries in one place.)  while i agree that presentation issues with too many columns are a concern, i would suggest the solution here is to have a much more customizable interface that allows organizations to set one or more "custom table formats" for summary data to display in.  an interim solution could be an easily hackable section of code for the display table, with instructions, that would allow anyone tech savvy to pretty quickly change the fields displayed, widths, etc.  is there any existing discussion on this?  i would be up for contributing...

4. i added a "feature request" to that page.  i might be up for doing a patch contrib, since this is a high-priority issue for us.  my guess is that the code for exporting this same data in csv (see issue tracker link in initial post) probably has the requisite data interaction, is that right?  any suggestions about where to focus on for adding a column to the display?

thanks much,
.b

I'm interested in having certain custom fields for membership be visible just to certain roles. For example, staff need to track whether two premiums associated with two membership types have been provided/delivered. Looking at http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/Membership+Types doesn't suggest a solution.

1. How do I associate a custom profile with some but not all membership levels?
2. How do I hide fields in a custom profile associated with a membership level from certain roles?

Field level ACLs along the lines of 2 seem like they should be implemented as a custom one-off - comments?

Thanks, Dave. I'll look into this.