Posted by webpotato on June 23, 2009 at 6:17pm
Many Drupal sites run by non-profits also use CiviCRM. Many of those have memberships in the organizations managed by CiviCRM. When a user visits a site of a membership organization that uses CiviCRM and goes to the "My Account" page, s/he will see "Member for x years and x months".
I think Drupal should not use the word "member" on this page. This "membership" will likely bear no relation to the user's membership in the organization and is confusing.
I think future Drupal releases should replace the word "member for" with "registered website user for" to be as clear as possible.
Comments
I've been an active member for x years!!!
I find it hard to believe no one has voted or commented on this yet.
I am currently fielding angry emails based on the perception of this very wording, "member for". The emails pretty much state: "I've been a very active member for xx years. The website says I've only been a member for y. Fix it!".
The site in question is a chamber of commerce website. The situation is aggravated by the fact that I originally set the site and individual user accounts up over a year ago. Unfortunately, fear and politics bared the release of the access details to the individual members until the 'chamber masters' abandoned the house and a more cooperative, forward thinking group of volunteers stepped in to pick up the pieces.
Anyway, I landed here because I was searching for something more appropriate than trying to hide it with css. Looks like http://drupal.org/project/myaccount_alter may be the way to go.
Stopped to give you a +1. Wording it this way would have prevented my search in the first place.
Not every issue receives a lot of traffic
Thanks for bringing this up, @pvswan! I had not thought about this issue at all, but need to do so for at least one site I am working on. But the module you point to is for Drupal 5, has not been upgraded in over two years, and has a note from the developer that says they are no longer maintaining it. Even if you are using D5, it's possible — perhaps even likely — that there are security holes that have been discovered since then but remain unplugged.
The better approach would be as the module developer suggests: Follow the thorough instructions at How to create a custom module to hide or alter the position of elements on the Drupal My account page to develop your own custom fix.
For help, you might also look to the Churches group. I imagine this issue would be at least as serious there. As talented as many members of that group are with Drupal, they might even already have a fix to share. If not, they could at least help you get through the process of creating your own.
Good luck!