[Gllug] Membership system: recommendations please

[David L Neil Mailing list a/c]

Sean Burlington wrote:
> David L Neil Mailing list a/c wrote:
>> Am looking for a (relatively simple) membership system which will track
>> society members and the status of annual fee payments, which can also be
>> hooked up to Apache authentication. Would welcome your recommendations
>> please?
> 
> I don't think you can get something simple that deals with all your 
> requirements
> Have you looked at http://civicrm.org/
> I'm pretty sure it does everything you want (and beyond that it's 
> customizable)
> Not easy to set up last time I tried (but not awful either)
> I have a (non-paid) project I keep trying to find time to build a 
> civicrm setup for - but the mail integration offends me so I got 
> sidetracked writing an better mail module... then got tied up with too 
> much other (paid) work.


Sean,

Funny you should say that, because trawling various ideas led me into
the Drupal and CiviCRM combination (there is also a Joomla/CiviCRM combo).

I have achieved as much as setting up a fresh VHost with the dynamic
duo. Strangely enough, the first thing I did was to confirm that the
email worked - it didn't. Mind you the default option was to state my
ISP's SMTP server - which still didn't work, and I haven't gone back and
replicated the (working) settings for PHP (under CentOS) which the
?stupid? thing should have defaulted to use in the first place...

The second thing was to try to sync the Drupal IDs into CiviCRM's
'member' records - CRASH! Maybe I have to activate a few more features
before... Not that this is a big deal because I was the only Drupal
'member(s)'. It also seems reasonable that users/members be issued with
new (randomised) passwords should a new system be built - and thus the
Apache .htpasswd file would be simply assigned to oblivion. This
presumes that CiviCRM will set a password for Drupal though!

CiviCRM does look impressively capable. So I'm playing the same tune as
you, hoping to find the time to make sense of the fairly compendious
manual, and also hoping that I won't have to get too far into it/that my
assignment's objectives are simple... Will be happy to share config
'discoveries', if interested (am not planning to get into the underlying
code like you)

Thanks,
=dn
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