Using Community Builder to Display Sponsors

I'm using Membership Pro to replace CBSubs (expensive and overly complicated).

Community Builder has a very sophisticated List creation system, which I've used to create very nice Sponsor pages for my clients - they show the logos, contact details, a brief bio, and are sorted by their sponsorship level.

Membership Pro appears to only have a basic table for listing the Sponsors.

I can set the Fields in Membership Pro to sync with the corresponding fields in Community Builder (which automatically creates the Joomla User entry), so front-end Registration is set to use Membership Pro.

I'm wondering if there is a way to get the Sponsor Category and Plan info to sync from Membership Pro to Community Builder so that I can use it to display the Sponsors List on the website.

If I create custom fields for Category and Plan in MP (which would not be shown to the user) to sync with CB, how do I get the Category and Plan into those MP fields to sync so that I can then use the CB fields for sorting and designing the CB Lists like I do now?

Any ideas will be very helpful.
Ernie

Hi Ernie

There is a plugin called Membership Pro - CB. You can :

1. Enable that plugin

2. Then for each custom fields in Membership Pro which you want to transfer data to CB, edit that field, set Field Mapping to the related field CB

3. When you do that, if someone subscribes via Membership Pro, the data will be transferred to CB and you can use CB to display Members List in the way you want

However, I would suggest you to customize layout of Members List page in Membership Pro (it has table layout and columns layout) to have it displayed in the way you want. Should not have to depend on a large extension like CB just for displaying Members List

Regards,

Tuan

I'm not sure I understand.

I have the Membership Pro - CB plugin activated, and have already set all the fields to sync with CB (that's one of the first things I did!).

But these are just name and contact fields - they are not the fields in Membership Pro that identify the Plan or Category. Are these fields somewhere else?

My CB List filters out all members who are not sponsors, then sorts the sponsors from highest level to lowest level.

My clients usually have both members and sponsors, so these are my categories. Then there are free and individual Member levels, and Silver, Gold, and Platinum Sponsor levels. So a field to filter out the non-sponsors and sort the sponsors by level (highest to lowest) is needed.

In CBSubs, these fields are included in CB's List setup so I can set it up to display exactly who and in exactly the order I want.

I don't see anything in the New field form in MP that would allow me to create a field to link to the MP Category or Plan. If there's a way to do that, then I could create hidden fields in CB that sync, and would be able to build the List in CB.

In CB, I can create multiple lists from scratch so I can display members and sponsors in different menus and with different layouts and parameters. I don't see anything like that in MP.

 

Thank you,
Ernie

 

Sorry for that long response - maybe my questions got lost in it all.
Is there a way in Membership Pro to display sponsors like the screenshot in my previous message?
Is there a way in Membership Pro to display more than one list in a separate menu item?
As I get deeper into Membership Pro, it actually seems like it might be better to replace Community Builder because of all the redundancies, except for this one important issue of being able to display multiple lists in different ways.
My clients all have subscribers who do not pay, and many have sponsors who pay for more exposure.
Some of my clients have a page that shows the subscribers in an alphabetized list, and each entry links to their profile which can be viewed either by logged in members or publicly.
Some also have paying sponsors that are displayed on a page with their logo and a brief bio, along with contact info (as shown in the screenshot).
I didn't find either the table or columns layout to be very attractive or customizable in Membership Pro.
If you have another extension that might integrate with Membership Pro to be able to show members in different lists based on various criteria - and which can be customized to look presentable - please let me know.
Thank you,
Ernie

Hi Ernie

1. Membership Pro does not have a layout to display sponsors like that. I think you can create a subscription plan to allow adding sponsors to that plan (sponsors are subscribers in this case). Then customize the layout of members list page to display sponsors using that layout. It is doable, but would require customizing code, unfortunately.

2. In Membership Pro, you can display subscribers from multiple plans already. It does not have an option to choose plans you want, but has an option to exclude plans. I can add options to allow choosing plans easily in near future

We do not have more kind of layout to display members at the moment. But surely, some kind of layout override could be implemented to have it looks like the way you want

Regards,

Tuan

For my purposes, that's a severe limitation - displaying the client's sponsors is a major part of why their members purchase sponsorships - for the exposure on the website.

I'd like to remove Community Builder going forward for my clients because Membership Pro does a better job and is a bit easier to implement.

As long as I have to keep Community Builder only for their List-display capabilities, is there a way that I could sync the membership level and effective dates from Membership Pro to fields in Community Builder which I could then use to build the List so that it updates with the member status in Membership Pro? Maybe a plug-in of some kind, or a query capability built into Community Builder that would allow me to access the relevant field in the Membership Pro data?

If not, it seems I might have to create a static page for every client to display their sponsors - that would be an incredible pain to have to keep track of when sponsorships expire on two dozen client websites and manually update them all the time.

Please look into building up your member display options to something that can rival Community Builder - it seems that it would be an important aspect of any membership program.

Thank you,
Ernie

In your setup in Membership Pro, where can we get list of sponsors to display? Please let me know so that I can understand your setup/request better to see if we can have a solution

Tuan

I have six membership options. Two are "free" and are treated as memberships. The other four are levels of sponsorship with different benefits.

The purchasers of any of those four sponsor levels need to be displayed like in the example in my earlier message (sorted with the top sponsor levels on top to the lower sponsorship levels at the end).

One of the membership options needs to be displayed as an alphabetic, usually by last & first name, but some prefer to have their member list sorted by company name or industry (which we use a custom field in CB, and could create in Custom Fields in MP).

The other membership level is board members which would display in its own list, sorted by their positions - Chair, Co-Chair, Vice-Chair, Secretary, Treasurer, etc. down to "at large" members. In CB, I use fields to enter their titles and a number field to sort by "ranking" so they display in the correct order (Chair = "1", Co-Chair = "2", etc.).

So I can see myself creating all these extra fields in MP, but there does not seem to be any way to filter, sort, or display those records in a very attractive way in MP. This is a strong point in CB.

I hope this explains it better.

If I'm going to need to keep CB just for the list display features, maybe there is a way to call the MP member/sponsor levels and end dates in the CB List queries so that I can have them working dynamically together.

They have a plugin called CB Auto Actions which might be able to do this - if this is not something MP can do, chances are CBs Auto Action plugin might help. I'll need their support to help me set it up.

Thank you,
Ernie

Hi Ernie

I believe these could be handled by Membership Pro, but of course, it would require customizing the layouts to meet your need and would cost some fees for the development

So if CB works for you now, I guess you can keep using it. When you really want to get rid of it, we can discuss further. I will try to learn about CB Lists feature to see if I can add some improvements to Members Lists feature of Membership Pro to make it more flexible

Regards,

Tuan

I don't expect you to build out a whole thing just for one client. But if you see added value to your customer base to extend Membership Pro to create powerful query-based lists with attractive and customizable display pages, or maybe even a new extension that would integrate with MP and some of your other extensions to allow for the creation of powerful lists, it's definitely something I would buy.

I think the solution for now might be for me to go to Community Builder support and find out how I can use their Auto Actions plug-in to link relevant fields from the relevant MP tables to corresponding CB fields so that I can create the lists in CB.

I believe I would need two fields from MP to integrate (along with the common Joomla UserID:

• Membership ID - the ID corresponding to what level of membership the person has.
• End Date - when the current membership expires.

In addition, the syncing of fields would need to be asynchronous so that the shared fields always match. I believe the process is that MP syncs with CB, and CB syncs with Joomla User. MP - with CB as the intermediary - does not sync directly with Joomla. If we ever get to a point where CB is no longer needed, then MP would sync directly with Joomla.

One thing I noticed is that when MP is installed, the CB customer edit is somehow blocked - I needed to replace it with the MP version - which I think is nicer anyway, but it does not have the fields used for the membership - like the logo image upload, and some other custom fields needed to display the lists.

So I still need to reconcile a few things - which program to use for various fields, which to sync, which extension I can use for various Administrator and User functions, etc.

Thank you,
Ernie