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I'm looking for a scheduling/booking plugin for what may be a special situation. I want to offer practice speaking tests for ESL exams, and many of these exams are done with 2 students at the same time. The exam takes about 15 minutes but I want to book 30 minute sessions for it. I'd like to be able to set my hours and then the first student will choose their exam and select 3-4 hours (so 6-8 sessions) they are available. Then another student comes in who has selected the same exam, checks the calendar and either chooses one session that matches the first student's availability or sets their own availability. If there's a match and the second student joins one of the first student's sessions, the plugin should automatically remove the extra sessions, send confirmation and reminder emails, be able to go to paypal, etc. It would be nice if the first student could adjust their availability as well, in case the second student set theirs and the first student decides they can do it at one of their times. It's all rather complicated, what are the best affordable options in this area? Appointments+ is the cheapest (assuming I don't need support), I also looked at booking calendar but it seems the best options are in the more expensive packages. Can these do what I need anyway? Any other options I should look at?
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Feb 15, 2013 11:06
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Hi, this might be a question for the more general web design thread but I'm posting here first because I have a feeling wordpress is the answer. Furthermore, LifeLynx posted:being able to hand off a site and go "Here you go, there are literally millions of people using this same system." Hello! That's what I want. I volunteer at a non-profit (I'm the unlucky "guy who knows about computers" so the website but also basically all of IT is left to me) and we run training/networking events, manage a job board and publish a printed journal as a local kind of hub for people in our field. We need to manage memberships, do events (registration/payment/promotion/follow-up), and promote/provide visibility to our journal. We're in Europe, we've got about 400 paid members (down from 900 ten years ago). What we have now: Our website is currently in Drupal and we use CiviCRM to manage the memberships and event registration stuff. I do a hacky sloppy manual update from CiviCRM to Mailchimp for our newsletter and promotions. The printed journal is just posted as a pdf that's only available to the public for a limited time with the back issues members-only. Everything's a big pain in the dick because we have to go through our Drupal devs or the Civi devs for a lot of stuff and any large real changes are simply way out of our budget at this point. The telecoms engineer who was the head of the website project has long since stepped away. What we'd like to have: Something that's cheap and (relatively) fast to set up and also easy to onboard editors/authors/future admins. A CRM that plays nice with both Mailchimp and postal mail, also handles monthly and/or annual membership payments as well as event registration and site visibility (so paid-up members see more than anonymous visitors). A versatile CMS that offers different page types (event pages, general info pages, blog-style pages for journal articles to be posted, job board for situations vacant and looking for work categories). I'd like to have about 2-3 editors plus a crew of authors. Questions: Is there any reason to consider something other than Wordpress? We did it in Drupal/CiviCRM primarily because of security concerns related to the member data we were holding--this was in 2013. Are there any Wordpress CRMs that can handle all that? Some combination of plugins? Is there an event management plugin I should look at? We'll hopefully be back to in-person events by next fall/winter but some of our online events will probably continue. Any massive blind spots that stick out? Something I've totally overlooked? Thanks for any advice you can offer! I'm mostly trying to understand my options at this point before I say anything to the rest of the committee.
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Nov 10, 2020 16:53
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Yeah we do, we're paying a couple thou per year just for security and updates which I want to cut but it hasn't been proposed yet. Although the budget is going into the shitter so I want to get ahead of that.
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Nov 10, 2020 17:14
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oof, member stuff is already hard but I was hoping maybe things had progressed from when we looked at it before. It's good to hear some positive feedback about Wild Apricot, I remember checking that out as a possibility a while ago. I had not heard about the Salesforce offer so that's interesting! We are registered with TechSoup so that should get us on the approved lists for that sort of thing. We're already running into the problem frogbs is describing with MailChimp and our CRM and the Drupal site and basically the Drupal site has to go at this point because it costs too much and it doesn't offer enough. I've been at this place since we got this thing set up and I just don't think I could ever hand it off to anyone in the state it's in. It would be nice to have it all in one but that takes a lot of work and you gotta pay people for that, so maybe a split system like you suggest is worth looking at, just making sure we can harmonise as much as possible when we set it up. Thanks so much for the advice so far! edit: I'm gonna take another look at Wild Apricot for sure 
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Nov 10, 2020 18:53
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Oh that's another thing I was wondering, what is the update cycle like these days? I have my own WP site that I just kind of left to wither and I remember there seemed to be monthly things I had to update or patch or something like that (I could be misremembering it in a bitchy haze). Have things settled down a bit by now? And am I still going to get floods of spam comments injected into every post or has Wordfence taken care of that?
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Nov 10, 2020 20:26
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We're a lot smaller than that. We're down now to around 500 active memberships across the different categories (we're also a teachers org, so that includes teachers, schools and publishers/sponsors), but we've got around 2500 total contacts in the database. A big reason behind my desire to undertake this whole change is to find a way to somehow reactivate these other contacts so I wouldn't want to give them up exactly, but it would also be a big monthly expense in Wild Apricot for example. edit: Honestly, if it seems like there's no magic bullet WP CRM solution (and when is there ever), the cheapest and easiest thing would just be to link CiviCRM up to a new WP site and keep the whole DB intact rather than trying to copy that over too. Unless there's some dreadful problem getting those 2 to play nice together. greazeball fucked around with this message at 16:18 on Nov 11, 2020 |
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Nov 11, 2020 16:13
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XBenedict posted:Something like this may help integrate the two. Brilliant! Thank you for this!
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Nov 12, 2020 00:23
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Misc posted:What are your pain points with CiviCRM's built-in email functionality which forces you to export everything to Mailchimp? Civi is a pain in the rear end but there's nothing else like it that's also open source. I think legacy mostly. We started using MailChimp before Mosaico came out and we have a couple of people who can write newsletters and do promotions through that. We wanted to expand the outreach quickly so we stuck with what the team members already knew how to use. The other advantage was limiting access to our member DB because our users have all the chaotic destructive powers that you would expect. Now the urge is to rock the boat as little as possible but we'll have to pay the Civi devs to connect the DB to any wordpress site that we make and while we're contracting hours I guess we could also ask them to add in a new level of permissions for email writers. That's probably the smart thing to do but I get tired just thinking about it.
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Nov 13, 2020 13:17
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I haven't been following this thread since you all gave me a bunch of advice earlier (thanks again!) and don't know how relevant this will be but... Jetpack sent a notice to my wife today that there was an issue with Divi, click here to resolve it. And it loving DELETED DIVI without a confirmation check and certainly no indication that it was deleting instead of deactivating poo poo. She's restoring from backup now. Maybe you guys are used to this from Jetpack or you never get it but I thought I'd raise the alarm just in case it helps someone avoid this particular bullshit.
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Oct 19, 2021 15:01
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Fixins posted:I don't use Jetpack. Because of horror stories like that. Sorry it happened to you. kedo posted:That sounds like a pain in the rear end, but tbh it sounds like Jetpack is doing the lord's work because Divi is a huge piece of poo poo theme that deserves deletion! I totally get how painful it probably was to deal with, but this still gave me a nice, sensible chuckle over my morning coffee. haha I had no idea both of the products were so bad. They've served her OK so far although I think she's done with Jetpack for sure at this point. Fortuantely, someone else in the non-profit where she works hosed up a quarter million dollar purchase on behalf of the federal agency that provides the majority of their funding just last week so she can probably fly this little hiccup well under the radar.
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Oct 19, 2021 17:52
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