Membership Number / Reference – Storage and Display

[woodwardmatt]

Hey Guys!

I’m looking at importing an existing member list into a new instance of eMember. I’m pretty comfortable with import process itself (may even just use MySQL directly) but I’m just trying to ensure I have all data modeled as required.

One gap I have spotted, and would value your input on, is the facility to store & show a Membership Number for each member. I’m aware I could store this as a custom field, but do not want the member to have the facility to change this value as part of the Edit Profile screen.

Any thoughts / guidance?

Many thanks, Matt

[admin]

The Member ID and Username are the only two fields that cannot be edited by the member. There is not option to have a non-editable field unfortunately.

[woodwardmatt]

Hey there,

Sorry perhaps I should have been a little more specific. When I say Member Number, I am not referring to the “User ID” which acts as the primary key for the member list. I was more so querying if there was a concept of a “Membership Number” field that could be managed solely by the WP-site administrators and that the Member could only view (envisage the concept of a membership number on a member’s card).

The current member list (that i’m importing) essentially has a “membership number” meta data field, which I was hoping I could incorporate into the eMember member list – but on first glance the only way I can foresee of doing this is using a custom field – however the member could then edit this which is not desirable.

I can appreciate this facility may not be in the plugin at the moment, I was just looking for confirmation that I wasn’t missing anything?

Many thanks, Matt

[woodwardmatt]

In the end I have used the primary key for this and just used the member_id property for use on the site. In the instance the client hadn’t used their membership number anywhere to prominent for this to be an issue.

Going forward I can see a legitimate business case for this though. Imagine a client where they had a few thousand members and had printed membership cards etc. already. Not being able to have an arbitrary membership number as part of the plugin would be a bit of a feature gap.

I’d foresee the following requirements:

– Read-only membership number for the user

– Membership number auto-creation based on a defined set of rules (may not always be numeric) defined in the settings

E.g. Length of “X” – Where X is an integer representing Length

Format of “AAXXXAXX” – Where A is alphabetic and X is a numeric, and the format is user-defined

Option of “Sequential” or “Random” for generating new membership numbers

Option to pad numeric membership numbers with leading zero’s

Option of providing a “seed” i.e. the point where the membership numbers should begin from e.g. I have already used up to 4550, so my next member should be 4551

My thinking is that the primary key is really for database use, not for membership numbers. Hopefully some of the ideas above show where the differences lie.

I’ll keep my fingers crossed that this gets considered! I kinda see it as a bit of a fundamental part of a membership system / platform.

Otherwise thanks for the awesome work, really impressed with the plugin

[Author]

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