Memberships are created and sold as products in your store (see the Product Pricing Tab for more information). Downloadable software is also treated as a membership for purposes of approval and expiration. The Membership section of the admin area allows you to view and manage the memberships purchased in your store, as well as manually process any recurring memberships.
 
The Memberships Manager provides you with a list of memberships in the system, with those requiring approval listed first, then sorted by the start date. Memberships (or software downloads) purchased offline will require approval, while those purchased with credit cards will be automatically approved. Purchases with PayPal will be approved if the transaction was completed; pending transactions will need to have the membership approved once the transaction is completed.
 
By default, the last week’s activity will be displayed. Search fields and filters are also available to view the memberships. These include the following:
 

1. Username/Email – The customer’s username or email that purchased the membership.
2. Type – The membership type. Select membership for site access memberships, product for site downloads and promo for promotional memberships you add in the admin area manually.
3. Product – The product name for this membership that was purchased
4. AccessKey – For memberships, the access key ID that this membership provides.
5. Expired – Search according to the expiration status of the membership. Choices are:
   1. All – Find all regardless of status
   2. Current – Currently available memberships
   3. Recurring – All memberships that will renew automatically
   4. Expired – Expiration date for the membership has passed
   5. Future – Memberships that will become active in the future.
   6. Suspended – Memberships that have been temporarily suspended by the admin
6. Used – Display memberships whose access count has (or has not) been used up. Generally used to find software downloads, since access counts are not used with memberships.
7. Valid – Display valid or invalid memberships.

 
Links are also provided to show ALL memberships or Recent (created in the last week) and to add a New Membership.
 
The following information is displayed for each membership on the list:
 

1. No. – The membership ID number, and a link to Edit the membership.
2. User/Product – The first line under this heading will show the username for the customer that the membership is assigned to (generally the person that purchased it) with a link to the user summary page for that user. On the second line, it will show the membership type (membership, download or promo) and the product ID and name for the membership.
3. Key(s) – The access key(s) ID (number) assigned to this membership. The access key ID can be viewed in the access key admin area.
4. Days – Number of days the membership is valid for. This is taken from the product information and used for calculating the expiration date for the membership.
5. Accesses – This generally applies only to downloads, shows the number of times the product has been downloaded and the number allowed. If this is a recurring membership product, it will show “RECUR” here. If the membership recurs to another product the ID for that product will be displayed.
6. Start|Expire – The start date and expiration date for the membership.
7. Valid – This will contain information on the status of the membership and links to process it. If the membership is current and valid, “Current” will be displayed. If it is current, but hasn’t been validated (such as an offline order) there will be a link to validate it. Expired memberships will show “Expired” and if the user’s account has been disabled it will show “Fraud”. If this is a recurring membership, an additional line will be displayed. If the user’s credit card on file is not valid, it will show “Bad Card”. If their card is valid, there will be links to manually renew the membership, either with an online order, or offline order.

 
The form for creating or editing memberships includes the following:
 

1. Membership ID – Displayed when editing, this is the system ID assigned to the membership
2. Order ID – Displayed only when editing memberships created in your store, this is the order number the membership was purchased on.
3. User – The username this membership is assigned to.
4. Product ID – Select the product assigned to this membership. All membership and download products in the store will be displayed. While this selection is optional, for downloads you should select a product or the download link for the customer will not work properly.
5. Type – The type of membership. Select membership for site access memberships, product for software/file downloads and promo for promotional memberships you add in the admin area manually.
6. AccessKeys – Select the access keys to assign to this membership. For downloads, you would set this to “none”.
7. Start – Start date for this membership. Can be left blank for no start date.
8. Expire – Expiration date for this membership. Can be left blank if no expiration date.
9. Days – Number of days the membership is valid for. This is informational only, the start and expiration dates determine when the membership is active.
10. Accesses – Number of accesses allowed for software downloads. Not used for content access.
11. Access Used – Displays the number of accesses to the download the customer has used.
12. Recurring – Sets whether this membership will automatically renew. Currently only the Shift4 gateway is supported for recurring memberships, by using secure tokens for recharging the user’s credit card.
13. Renew to Different Product – Used if this membership is a one-time offer and will renew to a different product. Select the membership product from the list of available ones you have created in the products section.
14. Valid – Activate or turn off the membership. Memberships purchased in the store using a valid credit card will automatically be validated, ones that are purchased using offline methods or purchase orders will have to be manually validated.
15. Suspend Starting – For memberships that are current, you can temporarily suspend it for a customer using this feature. Select the date here to start the suspension. They will not be able to access the membership features starting on this date.
16. Suspend Ending – The ending date for the suspension. Any remaining time on the membership will start on this date.

 
Click Update to save your changes or Delete to remove the membership record.
 

Additional Notes for Recurring Memberships

 
If you are planning to use recurring memberships and wish the store to automatically bill customers as their memberships are expiring, you should use the settings to store credit card tokens for the user (currently supported only for Shift4). You will also need to set up the daily task that checks for these memberships and renews them. It will send the customer a reminder that they will be billed 3 days ahead of time so that they can cancel if they wish, and you will also have links in the membership section to cancel the renewal manually.
 
The template for running the daily tasks is found in the admin/scheduled directory. You will find daily, weekly and monthly templates which you can use for any other scheduled tasks you might need to run. For the recurring memberships, the necessary code has already been added to the daily.cfm page. You will need to set up a scheduled task in the CF admin (or have your host add it) that will call this file at least once a day in order to process these functions. Just set the scheduled task to call the file directly (not through a fuseaction) sometime between midnight and 1 am:
 
http://www.storeurl.com/storedirectory/admin/scheduled/daily.cfm
 
By default, the template is set to run once a day and will renew any memberships that will expire that upcoming day. Alternatively you can set it to run throughout the day, like every 2 or 3 hours, giving the customer more time to cancel the membership before it renews. To do this, set the schedule to run it every x hours in the CF admin (be sure to still start it between 12 and 1 am as the code runs certain functions at that hour only) and change the setting for “run_interval” at the top of daily.cfm to match the interval you are using.