CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi all,

We're working with a non-profit to upgrade their drupal 5 site to drupal 6 so that we can update civi to 2.1 and then 2.2 (and soon 3.0). One of the members recently attended the DC CiviCRM Meetup and asked some folks about some features that would really help out. The responses she got indicated that some of this is already do-able and some may need custom programming. (Aside: If we wanted to propose some changes/hire custom development, what is the process -- we would want to get it into core so it didn't break on each upgrade).

There are two main types of membership -- individuals and groups. Individuals are working fairly well as is, so I won't spend much time on them -- users signup/pay/are activated in a drupal role designated for individuals. There are a few other things we'd like to see but I won't dwell on them here.

Group memberships are proving to be a challenge and a real time-sucker currently. Here's what would be ideal:

• Group admin signs up in the same way as the individual, but chooses a different membership type (e.g. Group (3-6 members) or Group (7-10 members))
• They pay/are activated in a drupal role designated for a group admin (or potentially the individual role)
• They are given a screen to enter the sub-account memberships (e.g. 6 slots for "Group (3-6 members); 10 slots for "Group (7-10 members)" with the following info for each submember: first name, last name, email, username, password)
• All sub-accounts should be associated with the group admin and "share" her membership (ie. are activated as long as group admin keeps membership current)
• These sub-accounts and the group admin can see the membership info and connection in their contact dashboard
• Group admins can assign passwords to sub-accounts, update their email addresses, add/delete sub-accounts according to the size of the group account (3-6; 7-10, etc)
• Group admins get notifications to renew 30 days and 10 days before expiration, can pay online or request an invoice (e.g. PDF) be emailed to them based on the info in their account

Here's what they do currently:

• Group admin signs up, chooses group membership and is activated in drupal as a group admin
• They contact by email to get sub-account info and either manually enter it or import by CSV
• Manually go into each sub-account and connect it via a designated "relationship" to the main admin account
• Sub-accounts are locked from changing email address, password, etc., so if group admin wants to change that, they get emails and have to do it manually

You can imagine that all the manual aspects of the current system can end up taking a lot of time -- and the sub-accounts can't see the relationship in the contact dashboard, etc.

Is there a better way to set this up with features that are currently available? If we need to hire custom coding, is this something that could be broadened to more general usage and fit into core? How do we go about getting an estimate on that?

Thanks!