membership management

bici · 2016-06-14 22:57:09

Hi – our organization is looking at way of easily maintaining our memebrship list of approx. 400 members. We also need a way to share some files like images and word docs etc.

I explored using Textpattern, but it doesn’t seem like a good solution for what we need. plus it should be easily administered as there will be others to pass the admin role to.

I looked and tried a couple of “membership-management-software” – such as Wild Apricot and MemberPlanet, but they are either too costly or a bit too complicated to maintain especially as there will be others involved.

anyone have any other recommendations? Any experiences with a good solution?

thanks

jakob · 2016-06-15 14:53:12

I seem to remember that Jonathan Stubbs successfully hooked up textpattern to Amember which is a fixed-price solution. That handled payments for ads on his tennis site.

It really depends what you need it to do. If you don’t need to handle payments, you might be able to use something completely different. For example: I’ve used vanilla forum in the past to handle user logins and user profiles then added a search interface to textpattern that temporarily queries the vanilla user database =on the same host) using rah_swap. It worked, indeed still works well. If you combined that with a member-only forum area for files etc., you might have what you need.

bici · 2016-06-15 15:14:02

We do need a payment hookup and paid up members need to have ability to update profiles.

michaelkpate · 2016-06-15 15:41:30

I did a search for membership software at Github. Which going off Tendenci, which seems to be the most popular, took me to alternatives

bici · 2016-06-15 17:01:40

nice finds! Zenbership Membership Software looks interesting. We could have TxP as front end and then memebrship stuff done with Zenbership in sub-directory

jstubbs · 2016-06-16 00:32:21

Yes the write up on aMember on Textpattern Tips is here but may be a little out of date. Seems the site I worked on still uses aMember, but not sure if they added any further bells and whistles.

Destry · 2016-06-21 08:26:40

I have Flarum’s beta (beta 6 coming soon) setup, discussion.csf.community. And though we don’t integrate it with Txp’s login (nor have plans to), I’m seeing many reports in the Flarum community that people easily make such integration with their main site platforms using Flarum’s API.

And there’s going to be a feature to make different discussion groups private, so while you could wall the whole thing off, you’d also have the option to have both public and private areas.

There’s no hard files management (yet), but there’s a MediaEmbed extension that handles everything listed here. Since it supports Google docs, I’d assume it could support Office 365 docs too, or could be made to do so with a request to the developer.

I couldn’t tell if you needed to collect member fees… There’s no feature for that right now, but I’ve seen extension requests for something like that. It could materialize in the future. The extension development is pretty light right now, but that might be because of the beta status. Lot’s of potential there for devs, though.

The admin-side is dead easy. But you would need someone handling the server side stuff, which is managed through Composer right now. And while Composer throws people off at first who are used to the “manual-update” way of things, I’ve since realized how easy Composer is for keeping both the core install and added extensions up to date — run a single command on the command-line. Done.

It’s still in beta, of course, and the user/groups needs augmented, which is on the roadmap. But at beta5, Flarum been rather robust so far. We’re keeping it limited to a few users until the first stable, but maintaining and up-building/improving as we go until then.

If you need heavy document management features, though, Flarum isn’t the way to go right now, nor if you need a payment gateway.

hcgtv · 2016-09-07 16:36:55

Destry wrote #299889:

The admin-side is dead easy. But you would need someone handling the server side stuff, which is managed through Composer right now. And while Composer throws people off at first who are used to the “manual-update” way of things, I’ve since realized how easy Composer is for keeping both the core install and added extensions up to date — run a single command on the command-line. Done.

Flarum looked promising, but if they don’t get a zip and install option, it’s not going to gain many users and as such will whither away on the pile of projects that once was.

Pity, I really liked it and installed it on one of my domains to handle the commenting from a Textpattern site. Something I had done with PunBB many moons ago, but Flarum fits the bill better, easier to embed, like Disqus.

Edit: Sorry for digging out an old thread, just noticed it was a spammer above me.

Last edited by hcgtv (2016-09-07 16:38:24)

Destry · 2016-09-07 17:44:46

hcgtv wrote #301193:

Flarum looked promising, but if they don’t get a zip and install option, it’s not going to gain many users

They’ve made it clear that it’s coming with the first stable, or there about after. Composer is just through the beta period.

hcgtv · 2016-09-07 19:24:33

Destry wrote #301203:

They’ve made it clear that it’s coming with the first stable, or there about after. Composer is just through the beta period.

Yes, I know, but their extension mechanism almost requires composer. Like I said, I really like Flarum, but my money is on FluxBB with a responsive design.

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#1 2016-06-14 22:57:09