Society Management

My Top 3

There comes a time of year, be it April, October or whenever else, that a group or society should be auditing their records and producing hard copies to hand over to some other seemingly arbitrary group who will then repeat the process until everyone is satisfied (or irate with each other).  Though no names are to be mentioned here, those who know what I am talking about need not ask why I am making this post.

The problem is a lack of automation software for such tasks.  Membership lists compiled in Excel (.xls), dozens of pages of paper with mistakes, poor handwriting and the inevitably faulted typed versions.  As far as I know there is no free software that I would be willing to use to manage this.

What’s the problem with simply throwing together a Django or Pylons application?  Support.  A simple Java, XULRUNNER or Python+GTK CRUD App? Support and general ignorance; people are uncomfortable with learning how to use new applications.  While the Java application is still on the books I have neither the time nor inclinations to emerse myself in the “wonder world” of Java (I’ll hopefully do this later in the year) and for now I am sticking to what I know, remember and to what have easy access.

So a webapplication seems to be the way to go but I cannot use Python for a simple society (they can’t afford Python hosting), I refuse to use Ruby and it has similar issues to Python anyway so that leaves me with PHP or Perl.  As I stand by my opinion that Perl is difficult to work with and irritating to maintain I’m stuck with the lesser (greater?) of the two evils and shall begin this task in PHP.

I have been playing with Eclipse and PHP for the last few hours but the outstanding assignments  are going to be of some issue.  More than a lack of time, my desire to make my code as modular as is humanly possible is certainly going to be somewhat of an issue.  Having rejected the license agreement of ADODB and a few templating engines I am falling back on knowledge gained during PHP3’s transition to PHP4 and discovering that things have come a long way.

At the moment I’m stuck somewhere between modularising the “template engine” and hacking together some database support that’s centralised and switch controlled.  The next problem is that I like my designs to work, so I have to create a generic template then touch it up for the society I am actually creating this for…

Hopefully, if all goes well, I’ll have this done before February 2009…