5 ms·

Ask HN: Membership Management System

5 points by palidanx 5y ago

I've been asked to help create a system for my community garden to help manage memberships. Right now it is being done painfully on spreadsheets. I'm debating 1. Rolling up a Rails instance coding the minimum to meet the features 2. Looking for an open source member management system (checks on github are unsuccessful so far) 3. Paying for a monthly service. Does anybody have any leads on points #2 or #3?

readonthegoapp 5y ago
i vote #1. for several reasons: - looking for this kind of software (and most kinds) sucks - these systems always seem overpriced - they never seem to do what you want - while they always do way too much - community gardens are cool, so deserve their own type of system - airtable and the like are awful (imo), unless you truly need them - you can open-source the software if that's your thing - and you can provide the .com saas hosting if that's your thing well, as you can see, i was building my case, but then i found this: https://www.communitygardenapp.com/ https://www.communitygardenapp.com/
- palidanx 5y ago
  yea actually my garden uses that community garden app, but it hasn't met the needs because users don't have the ability to update their own info. But for the amount of time I spent researching to your point, I probably could have coded half of the site by now in rails. But I guess it is always a tco of a coder using their time vs paying 80 a month which in the long term isn't that bad.
  - readonthegoapp 5y ago
    wonder if a quick email to them could get them to add that feature? seems like a side project for them all, but sounds like an easy enough (and obvious) feature. i did a quick look for multi-tenant ruby saas boilerplate, and saw the usual list of things that don't quite do that, but all of them seem to do at least single-tenant -- and prob most would claim they do multi-tenant if you just add 5 or 50 hours of dev: https://www.getsjabloon.com/ https://www.getsjabloon.com/ i don't know anything about these particular guys. but my thinking is, you can get to (what seems like) 80 or 90% in a few hours, but that final 20 or 10% takes 50 hours more, plus ongoing maintenance/support/etc. i'd pledge $5 at six months from now (possibly more) to see it done - just to try to kickstart it.
    - palidanx 5y ago
      hey thanks for the link! Yea I think refactoring into multi tenant isn't going to be terribly hard as long as there is some foundational basics there.
LinuxBender 5y ago
This might be too old school but you could deploy a forum have your members register then set ranks based on their memberships. For me an easy go-to would be phpBB [1] They could set email, profile info, interests, etc... The members can follow topics, receive optional email notifications and so on. [1] - https://www.phpbb.com/ https://www.phpbb.com/
- SkittyDog 5y ago
  ... and now you have TWO problems!
  - LinuxBender 5y ago
    ... and now you have TWO problems! What are the two problems?
    - SkittyDog 5y ago
      Sorry, I could have explained that better... I was alluding to an old saw about solving problems using Regular Expressions: • https://blog.codinghorror.com/regular-expressions-now-you-have-two-problems/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/regular-expressions-now-you-ha... It was a joke. I was trying to take a cheap shot at PHPBB.
      - LinuxBender 5y ago
        Fair enough. I suppose phpBB is kindof out of style these days. Maybe web4 will bring it back to some degree. I suppose another solution that is lighter weight and battle hardened, assuming one just wanted identity management would be to put Lam Pro (paid app) in front of OpenLDAP. That way you can support any extensions required.
Risse 5y ago
Here's an open source member management system: https://pinomembers.com/ https://pinomembers.com/ It's based on Drupal. Disclaimer: I am the developer.
Doctor_Fegg 5y ago
CiviCRM? Might be a bit heavyweight.
seanwilson 5y ago
You mean only a list of members? Or there's data and varying permissions? I'd say that coding something custom is likely to be a big ongoing burden unless it's really simple.
- palidanx 5y ago
  so basically it will have two sides - admins --> ability to assign gardens, create users - users --> can log into their account and see the status of their account, which garden they are assigned to, and if they are in good standing
  - seanwilson 5y ago
    Would something like https://www.airtable.com/ https://www.airtable.com/ work?
    - palidanx 5y ago
      interesting suggestion! Perhaps, looking at an authentication solution around that also
      - seanwilson 5y ago
        Can you use the built-in user permissions instead? https://support.airtable.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043139673-Using-field-and-table-editing-permissions https://support.airtable.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043139673-...

5 points by palidanx 5y ago

readonthegoapp 5y ago

i vote #1. for several reasons: - looking for this kind of software (and most kinds) sucks - these systems always seem overpriced - they never seem to do what you want - while they always do way too much - community gardens are cool, so deserve their own type of system - airtable and the like are awful (imo), unless you truly need them - you can open-source the software if that's your thing - and you can provide the .com saas hosting if that's your thing well, as you can see, i was building my case, but then i found this: https://www.communitygardenapp.com/ https://www.communitygardenapp.com/

palidanx 5y ago
yea actually my garden uses that community garden app, but it hasn't met the needs because users don't have the ability to update their own info. But for the amount of time I spent researching to your point, I probably could have coded half of the site by now in rails. But I guess it is always a tco of a coder using their time vs paying 80 a month which in the long term isn't that bad.
- readonthegoapp 5y ago
  wonder if a quick email to them could get them to add that feature? seems like a side project for them all, but sounds like an easy enough (and obvious) feature. i did a quick look for multi-tenant ruby saas boilerplate, and saw the usual list of things that don't quite do that, but all of them seem to do at least single-tenant -- and prob most would claim they do multi-tenant if you just add 5 or 50 hours of dev: https://www.getsjabloon.com/ https://www.getsjabloon.com/ i don't know anything about these particular guys. but my thinking is, you can get to (what seems like) 80 or 90% in a few hours, but that final 20 or 10% takes 50 hours more, plus ongoing maintenance/support/etc. i'd pledge $5 at six months from now (possibly more) to see it done - just to try to kickstart it.
  - palidanx 5y ago
    hey thanks for the link! Yea I think refactoring into multi tenant isn't going to be terribly hard as long as there is some foundational basics there.

LinuxBender 5y ago

This might be too old school but you could deploy a forum have your members register then set ranks based on their memberships. For me an easy go-to would be phpBB [1] They could set email, profile info, interests, etc... The members can follow topics, receive optional email notifications and so on. [1] - https://www.phpbb.com/ https://www.phpbb.com/

SkittyDog 5y ago
... and now you have TWO problems!
- LinuxBender 5y ago
  ... and now you have TWO problems! What are the two problems?
  - SkittyDog 5y ago
    Sorry, I could have explained that better... I was alluding to an old saw about solving problems using Regular Expressions: • https://blog.codinghorror.com/regular-expressions-now-you-have-two-problems/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/regular-expressions-now-you-ha... It was a joke. I was trying to take a cheap shot at PHPBB.
    - LinuxBender 5y ago
      Fair enough. I suppose phpBB is kindof out of style these days. Maybe web4 will bring it back to some degree. I suppose another solution that is lighter weight and battle hardened, assuming one just wanted identity management would be to put Lam Pro (paid app) in front of OpenLDAP. That way you can support any extensions required.

Risse 5y ago

Here's an open source member management system: https://pinomembers.com/ https://pinomembers.com/ It's based on Drupal. Disclaimer: I am the developer.

Doctor_Fegg 5y ago

CiviCRM? Might be a bit heavyweight.

seanwilson 5y ago

You mean only a list of members? Or there's data and varying permissions? I'd say that coding something custom is likely to be a big ongoing burden unless it's really simple.

palidanx 5y ago
so basically it will have two sides - admins --> ability to assign gardens, create users - users --> can log into their account and see the status of their account, which garden they are assigned to, and if they are in good standing
- seanwilson 5y ago
  Would something like https://www.airtable.com/ https://www.airtable.com/ work?
  - palidanx 5y ago
    interesting suggestion! Perhaps, looking at an authentication solution around that also
    - seanwilson 5y ago
      Can you use the built-in user permissions instead? https://support.airtable.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043139673-Using-field-and-table-editing-permissions https://support.airtable.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043139673-...