CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

We have been struggling with the membership facilities in CiviCRM because we have been unable to find a way of allowing members to pay their memberships in instalments. We are using Drupal 7.x, CiviCRM 4.6.x and the eWay payment gateway. We wish to adopt the eWayRecurring extension to CiviCRM. Ideally we would like to do the following:

Allow members to pay their membership fees in a predefined series of payments. For example if the membership fee is $300 we would like to allow members to make an initial payment of say $100 and then make 4 monthly payments of $50.00
We are comfortable that the initial payment updates their membership in accordance with the membership type. In our case for the fixed period of 1 year starting on 1st January.
Subsequent payments would have no impact on the status of their membership but it would be good if they were 'linked' to the membership, however not critical.
My thinking was to create a Membership Price Set which contains the membership component and separately a recurring contribution to pick up the additional payments. The problem is that it does not seem possible to pre populate the recurring payment with the parameters required and prevent them from being altered by the user.

Is this possible or is there a better way that others have adopted?