"Ghost" Memberships

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.

Second, your ghost needs a user (login) account.  Create one, and using a different browser go ahead and login as your ghost (you really need to keep your staff account at a distance from your ghost... b/c accidentally overwriting names and emails can happen).

Your ghost doesn't have a membership and is sad, because without a membership there is really nothing it can do on the membership site.  So we now have to give your ghost contact a ghost membership.

From the browser with your ghost logged in, go to:

https://www.rmhorse2.com/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=4&actio…

NOTE - there is an extra bar at the top of the page that looks like this:

 Test-drive Your Contribution Page

This page is currently running in test-drive mode. Transactions will be sent to your payment processor's test server. No live financial transactions will be submitted. However, a contact record will be created or updated and a test contribution record will be saved to the database. Use obvious test contact names so you can review and delete these records as needed. Test contributions are not visible on the Contributions tab, but can be viewed by searching for 'Test Contributions' in the CiviContribute search form. Refer to your payment processor's documentation for information on values to use for test credit card number, security code, postal code, etc.

That tells us we're good to use totally fake credit cards!  Hooray!

Get your favorite card from https://www.rmhorse2.com/staff/test-transactions and go ahead and give your ghost the membership you want.  

Tada!  Your ghost will receive all the usual receipts, you will have a membership listed in the contact screen — but only sort of (it will be listed, but not count to the number of memberships shown in the Membership tab).  There will also be a contribution record, but again not a real contribution is made.

Your ghost will NOT appear in the published Member Directory... but the preview of the directory in the Member Portal will function.  You should receive all of the renewal notices.

You can edit the status of your ghost's membership with abandon... move expiration dates around and see what email you get within 24 hours.