Hi,
I've been developing for OpenACS for about 6 months now, so am reasonably familiar with it. However I was looking for some advice on a new site I want to set up. (I'm not doing this commercially, just "for fun")
It's for an already existing "real world" subscription based club - and as such already has 1000 ish members (including myself), each with membership numbers and details stored in a FoxPro database. I want to import all this data into OpenACS. This is for two reasons:
1) To provide a web-based membership administration for the membership secretary
2) To allow "protected areas" on the site for members only (thus encouraging more people to join the club)
(later on we hope to have cool features like signing up to the club online with a credit card)
I was imagining I'd set up a separate table in the db for club members - which will have details like their membership number, whether they are a current member, the membership expiry date, etc. I'd probably create a package to administer this information (and provide features like exporting CVS files of addresses for their magazine mailings).
Most of the existing members don't have a registered email address, so I was thinking of adding a step to the registration process for the site where people add their membership number - this will confirm that they have an entry in the "members" table, and set them up as a user.
Does this sound like a sensible approach, or are there other better ways of doing this?
I'd also be interested to hear if anyone had any experience of setting up similar sites. Perhaps someone has already written a member-management package that I could take on a modify?
Thanks
Joe
