Membership Management

[chuckhubbert]

I am such a rookie...

 

As I learn site development, my head is spinning! I am using http://www.fentonlakes.com as my useful learning project.

 

We are a sportsmens club, and one of the things that might be cool would be to do membership management on the web. Any thoughts of where to look into that?

 

Also, while I am at it, we'd like to start accepting credit cards both at POS and online. Do I need to look into two services for that, i.e., POS and a merchant account?

 

Thanks in advance!

 

Chuck Hubbert

[scotttyz]

What kind of member managment?

 

I noticed you have a link to member information. I have 2 questions:

 

1) How do you want to control this: Automated sign up via web? They send you the $$ and you add them?

 

2) what do you want to use this for? For forum use? For password protected use? Guest Book? Email list? Or non-web related info?

 

If you can provide a little more information on what the use would be I might be able to help point you in the right direction.

[btrfld]

As far as Membership is concerned, you might look at aMember. I've not used it, but it gets rave reviews from some here at TCH who have.

 

As for accepting payment, I think you need several things; at least a SSL certificate so you can do secure transactions, and either a merchant account (for each credit card you want to accept) or a payment gateway like 2CheckOut or PaySystems.

 

You'll find much more information on the TCH Help Site. Cruise around, and you'll find much great info.

 

Good Luck!

[chuckhubbert]

I guess it could be any of the those, but let me "talk it out" a little bit.

 

How we do things now:

Memberships, both new and renewal, go to come to the treasurer who takes the money and forwards the information to the membership secretary who keeps the "official" list.

 

My vision: (it's brand new and subject to change...)

1.) Receive memberships on paper as now, but the "official" list is actually a database that is web accessible by the treasurer, membership secretary, and maybe others.

 

2.) Receive memberships online. Again, they are added to the "official" list.

 

3.) Use the membership list to send newsletters, renewal notices, etc.

 

4.) (really visionary) Our facilities could have "POS" terminals to verify membership and services that members have access to. An example would be a gym membership, where they check at the counter to see what level you have rights to.

 

I imagine that there is more we could do once implemented.

 

 

Thanks,

[btrfld]

Based upon your latter post, it sounds as if you're looking for something to manage your physical member list. As I said, I've never used aMember, but I get the impression that it's mostly designed for managing areas of a website. Someone with actual experience may be able to set us all straight about that.

 

Certainly, given PHP and MySQL on all servers here, you should be able pretty simply to craft a solution that will meet your exact needs, if aMember doesn't do it for you.