Discourse and our event management software

Ask Dallas Makerspace
#1

I’m a member of another 501(3)© organization. We’re looking for something like Discourse to allow us to communicate in a talk like forum. We’re also looking for ways to allow our members to pay their dues online and to schedule events. Sound familiar?

I’m interested in knowing if DMS would be able to share more information on how we manage all of these?
I think we paid for a developer to build the Event management software right? And I think we use another application to collect dues every month but I can’t recall the name.

@StanSimmons or @denzuko can you help me here?

I’m in the investigative stage at the moment and I know that there are lots of solutions to consider, but I think DMS has a pretty good handle on things.

Your help is most appreciated.

If this thread belongs in ad different category please feel free to relocate it.

Thanks,

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#2

Lots of other makerspaces are using wild apricot or gym master. I have discussed them with others before but was told they wanted to redo billing in house.

https://www.wildapricot.com

#3

Thanks a lot Alex. I appreciate the almost immediate response. I’ll look into your suggestions.

#4

Just a datapoint, but I belong to an org that uses Wild Apricot, and the forums are very un-modern. For a paid service, the whole thing is shockingly clunky.

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#5

I have not seen the forum side. I know the billing system has a decent API that most people use for Access control.

From what I have seen gym master looks better but it’s set up as you need an employee. Not serviceable really for the user.

#6

first tip one can give is look at our GitHub repos. The ones for the community grid, calendar, and maker manager are core to DMS and setting up software for a makerspace.

From there once one has a docker swarm cluster set up on prem or in the cloud then one can deploy discord and WordPress.

As for billing we’re refining our tools but looking at kill bill with stripe for the payment processing.

after that try to run a few Hackathons to have the membership build out some cool stuff and put together a few guidance for infrastructure (itil lite is a good model that one can Barrow parts from)

plus one can then look over the guides on Hackerspaces.org, and other wikis from us, atx and noise bridge.

#7

also if one is needing some coding help our software committee has a strong team that’s always looking for extra work. PM me and we’ll set up a time to talk.

#8

Dan, come by sometime and we can sit down and go over our current systems and some of the good points and the pitfalls we have to deal with.

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#9

Thanks. I appreciate the responses from you an everyone else. I’ll stop by sometime.

#10

Before the current calendar system, we used Google calendar. Some organizations use meetup.com

#11

i use to build and set up Discord servers and have lots of experience in that area. Let me know when and if youd like me to run you through the basics. I can do online mostly cant really travel but i stream and havve many other ways to be able to walk through and answer any questions.

#12

Thank you Derek. I will definitely give you a buzz when we get closer to making our decision about where to implement. Right now I’m looking pretty hard at Amazon AWS. Have you had any experience there?

#13

Have you ever installed Discourse under the discourse Wordpress plugin? Our site is hosted here: https://www.1and1.com/cloud-app-center/discourse-download#apps and is free if we install it ourselves.

I’ve just begun working on the website using Wordpress, which is a little new to me. 1&1 also supports, PHP, Python and other common development environments. I would like to make this an easy to support website as I don’t want to support it forever myself.

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#14

Interesting idea of integrating Discourse with WP. The purpose seems to make WP post topics in Discourse. Any replies in Discourse become comments in WP and vice versa.

Will have to try that out on our pyro discourse.

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