Charging for Membership - several levels needed

[corrado444]

I am working for a non profit (norcalsolar.org) that needs their members to be able to buy memberships at several different levels. Currently they want to use Virtuemart (with an eye to the future when they will be selling actual products) but I think it's a inelegant way.
The ideal solution would be a module that is set up to "sell" memberships. There are some already but this .oRG has several levels of memberships and I have to be able to pass the amount to Paypal for payment while taking the new member information.

I am sure this is neither rocket science nor an unusual request, however I have been unable to find a good solution so far.

I would appreciate any help from the community

PS: The current norcalsolar.org is not the joomla site I am building the testing site is on another server for the moment, but the mebership optiaons are the same.

[AJuOnLiNE]

Have you tried using AEC? Might "fit" the bill with a bit of customization if at all..

[DesignGuy]

Sounds like custom work. Nothing I've found fits that other than your inelegant VirtueMart.  Do you have a budget?

[lobo]

Check CiviCRM at http://civicrm.org

and more specifically CiviMember

http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/disp ... mber+Guide

this is present in the current v1.6 release

lobo

[bluefightingcat]

Hey,

Community Builder is coming out with a system like this. It should be ready any day now. You can have a look at joomlapolis.com.
However it would mean that you would have to use Community Builder. But there's nothign wrong with that. It's a great way to handle your users and your community.

BFC

[jialing1000]

Have a long time didn't come here, and I just see this note.

My experience on building up a membership subscription is to use AEC. Though my membership plan is very simple only one plan for one level user control. 

You can use Virtuemart also, and allow or disallow the Virtuemart to different level uses.

[corrado444]

Hi, I did not realize I got responses on this post. The email notification did not work.

In any case, I have tried AEC and for several reasons did not work in the project I was working on. Mostly because of poor organizational skills in the non profit organization I was consulting for.
Now I am working again with another national non-profit and I am looking at AEC again. They have a new version that I will be trying out today.
One of the issues with AEC is that the CB integration is minimal. Namely, it does not allow me to capture more than the basic data in CB, but that is a mission critical objective.

However, since the basic membership is free and the website is open to all, CB or even login integration with Joomla is now not critical. What is critical is the ability to use Authorize.net and to offer different levels of membership.

One of the problems with AEC is that upon expiration the user is forced to renew to access the site, while I would like to just remind the users to renew their membership. Considering that the basic level is free I would have the thorny issue of free members being able to login into the site while expired paying members would not.

Virtuemart could be a solution, but the issue there is that there is no membership expiration. Considering this non-profit will have membership in the thousands that's simply not practical. The administrators would have to audit members on a daily basis and send notices manually. Not viable.

Civic CRM is possibly the only piece of software I was never able to install properly. I have tried to install it in 3 different occasions and gave up each time. I figure that if it is that difficult to install (and I am not alone here) can't be that easy or flexible to use. At this point I don't even know how it works and if it has the features I need.

Thank you for your kind responses. I'll keep on looking but if anyone has any good solutions I am all ears (and maybe this time I will get notified of the posts)

[lobo]

Hey Corrado444:

Sorry to hear about your issues installing CiviCRM. If you have ssh access to your box, we'd be willing to login and help you install it (and in the process potentially fix some issues for a few other people too!)

CiviMember does offer the free membership option and someone recently contributed code for Authorize.net preprocessor

We obviously would love to fix the install issues and try to get u going on the software

lobo

[corrado444]

Hi Lobo, wow, that's really generous of you. I have to admit that I am sort of ashamed I was not able to make CivicCRm work on any of my trial installations. It has been a month since I last tried and I am willing to give it another shot.

I am afraid I don't have SSH access to the server my client's uses. We are currently hosted on Bluehost.com, but I have full access to Cpanel and I have just installed a virgin Joomla site in a subdirectory for testing purposes. I may try to install civicCRM there in the next hour or so but I suspect that any help you could give me would be greatly appreciated and necessary.

I have no problem giving you FTP access and Cpanel access after we contact each other in person (so to speak) and I know that if CivicCRM is a good solution for us the owner of the site is more than willing to purchase anything necessary to make this feature work.

The organization I am working for is called "Support Our Troops" and the main site is currently on supportthem.com but the main joomla site is on supportourtroops.org (it's a long story). I also have another site setup independently for the licensing of a "seal of Approval" but that should not be a problem. you can email me at conti (at) conticreative.com directly to bypass the forum security issues.

Thank you again and I am looking forward to hear from you.