Masquerade is a Drupal module that allows administrators to easily and temporarily view the screen as another user.  Its not a perfect module, and sometimes it gets confused about WHO is actually logged in ... and that causes some problems.  Its essential that you enter and then exit masquerade, as if you leave it on and then try to fill out a form ...well, who knows what might happen.

It is strongly recommended that you use Masquerade in a different browser from your primary one.  That way you can just close the window and get back to work!

You've created an event in CiviCRM and you want it - or want it not - to appear for the public.  How is this done?

In CiviCRM ..

There is, at this time,  no automated process for creating User (Drupal) accounts for contacts or members. 

The best way to create a user is by simply "tagging" them.  Under the Tags option - under the contact tab, the Actions tab or elsewhere - just select the tag "Create Drupal Account".  That's it!  One little checkbox!

NOTE:

Creating "Ghost" or fake accounts and memberships is a handy way to play with the system and see what happens.  When setup correctly these ghost memberships won't be included in any count of memberships.

First ... create a ghost contact.  At this time there is already a ghost account for each of the office positions (search CiviCRM contacts for "ghost" and you'll find them).  The main difficulty in creating a ghost account is that you can't re-use an email address - so you may need to use a gmail or other non-rmhorse.com account.

Newly applied members have their "member since" date set to the day they apply, but they aren't really members until the Board approves their membership application.  To aid in identifying which memberships require approval (and to help filter these "Awaiting Approval" memberships from lists of properly "Current" members) a flag is set on a custom field attached to the membership.

Here's what happens:

There are five basic status types with significant meaning and functionality:

A bit of history:

RMHA ID #s have been assigned under a number of different schemes.  Thus the numbers themselves range from "21" to "2021287"  The number itself and the size of the number have no particular meaning.  Further, these were treated as "membership" numbers initially, so one number was given for family memberships... and thus, yes, two adults have one number.

With the transition to the Drupal 9 site in November of 2021 the following decisions were made: