Membership management - allowing membership type to be changed on renewal while maintaining continuity

This is an interesting development! I'm glad this is being taken on. I have worked with a client that has some members that switch back and forth between lower and higher memberships. It makes it difficult to deal with automatic renewal reminder emails and reports of new vs. renewed memberships. A member may get a renewal reminder even though they had just renewed at a different membership level/type; their old membership continues to show up as being in grace or expired. And it makes it hard to figure out the continuity in memberships in order to find out the renewal rates versus the new. I always wondered why I hadn't heard of other people having the same issue.

I had created a cludge as a workaround, but would like a more elegant solution (a new membership status override was created called "switched" plus a custom module to automate it somewhat). I will try to wrangle some MIH money form the client for this.

I hope this solution is not just about "upgrades" but will also maintain the continuity if a member decides to "downgrade" as well. And I hope it allows the admin to select which membership types could be considered "upgrades" of each other. And maybe - since I'm providing some wishes anyway - a way of merging older memberships so they will appear together as an upgrade path.

Thanks!

Herb