HACKER Q&A
📣 palidanx

Membership Management System


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?

  👤 LinuxBender Accepted Answer ✓
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/

👤 readonthegoapp
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/

👤 Risse
Here's an open source member management system: https://pinomembers.com/ It's based on Drupal.

Disclaimer: I am the developer.

👤 seanwilson
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.

👤 Doctor_Fegg
CiviCRM? Might be a bit heavyweight.