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ysaward

An entire website for managing high-turnover YSA wards, with multi-stake support

Known existing sites

How to set up your own YSA ward website

Here's the thing... each site can host multiple stakes and wards. If you don't want to go through the hassle of setting up your own copy of the site and hosting it yourself, and if an existing site already has the features you need, try asking that site if your ward or stake could just be added to theirs. This way, there's very little overhead. It only takes about an hour or two (worst case) to set up a ward/stake on an existing site.

If you need some features that an existing copy of the site doesn't already have, you'll have to contribute to the project. Then you can ask an existing site to implement your new feature, or just make your own copy of the site and host it yourself.

How to contribute

Fork the project to build features or fixes into the site. Submit a pull request when you think it's ready to be added into the main development tree. No guarantees it'll happen, but that's okay.

Remember, updates to this repository do not automatically update any of the sites. That's a pill, I know, that each upgrade would have to be done manually. I'm not sure of the best way to handle this yet but I'm going to leave it to individual webmasters to figure it out. A thorough changelog, especially of breaking changes, would be very helpful, with each pull request or fork.

Site requirements/notes

Hosting

  • Linux. Recommended Ubuntu Server 12 or newer.
  • VPS or dedicated server. Shared hosting will not do because of various SMTP/HTTP requirements.
  • Recommended: Digital Ocean or Amazon Web Services EC2 or RackSpace Cloud Servers
  • PHP 5.3 or newer, with the PECL_HTTP extension and GD libraries installed
  • Recommended web server: nginx. Used to use Apache, but it was slower and more difficult
  • MySQL 5.2 or newer (I'm pretty sure, at least...)
  • Ability to make outbound, external SMTP and HTTP connections
  • Avoid CPanel-esque hosting (shared) at nearly any cost
  • Domain name (recommended registrar: NameCheap) (about $11/year)
  • Costs anywhere from $5-20 per month (if using a cloud instance)

Email/SMTP

  • Amazon SES account
  • Production sending abilities enabled
  • Verified domain name with the account
  • IAM user/password
  • DKIM properly configured
  • Payment method added to the account
  • Costs are minimal

Texting/SMS

  • Nexmo account -- tell them you're a non-profit, maybe they'll discount
  • At least one sending number in the account (more if sending to multiple wards)
  • Funds added to the account, preferably with auto-refill
  • They're in the UK, so their pricing is primarily in euros

Address verification

  • SmartyStreets account
  • You just need an API key for your site's domain name (use the "HTML key")

Configuration/setup instructions

  • Secure everything in the _WEBMASTER_ONLY folder such that only the webmaster can access them, if you even upload them at all. Those files are not part of the site, but are necessary helper tools or have important data. How you choose to restrict access to these files is up to you, but it's very important that you do. Those files have no security built-in, and only the webmaster should be able to use them.
  • Completely fill out the lib/defines_template.php file and rename it to defines.php.
  • Configure php.ini and your server config to allow for larger file uploads. This is optional, but typically the default limit is around 2M (2 megabytes) and people may want to use larger profile pictures. In nginx.conf, you'll want to use something like client_max_body_size 5M;. In php.ini, consider changing max_upload_filesize and also post_max_size to be a better size.
  • Set up your MySQL database using schema.sql.
  • Create a folder in the root directory of the site called uploads and chmod it to 0777. It will store profile pictures.
  • Set up new wards using createward.php. Remember to turn off the "safety" line.
  • Set up stake leaders with createstakeleader.php. Remember to turn off the "safety" line.
  • For externally-provided services like email and texting, follow the vendor's instructions for obtaining API keys and/or configuring your domain/site to work with their service.

Disclaimer/support

This was an entirely-donated project from the beginning. Yes, it's true that I maintain(ed) my stake's implementation of the site because of a stake calling, but I provide absolutely no support beyond that. In other words, setting up the site yourself or changing it is up to you and the community.

A brief history (with my lame excuses)

This project started as a weekend project at the request of my ward's executive secretary who didn't want to keep fumbling over several spreadsheets with new member data and duplication and errors happening all over the place.

It kind of grew from there when the stake wanted to use it (unofficially) and offer it to the wards to ease their semester turnovers. I scrambled to put new features and functions into place, so the code isn't necessarily best practice. However, it has some very nice little gems in there related to error handling, failovers, UI, etc.

So no, there's no PHP framework here. No MVC. It's just plain-jane PHP mixed with HTML and Javascript. Sorry if it's gross, but again, now it's open source: so feel free to improve upon it. It does the job, seems to do it well, and I hope that others will find it useful.

Recent Changes (Published Sept. 2013)

  • Open-sourced to GitHub; anyone is welcome to contribute or use
  • New, mobile-friendly design
  • Optimized for retina (high-DPI) displays
  • Printable directory, grouped by apartment, won't orphan a picture from the person's name
  • Cleaner URLs; for example, instead of site.com/fhe.php, it's just site.com/fhe
  • Login redirects; if you try to load site.com/callings, you'll be redirected there after logging in
  • More helpful error messages
  • Improved layout of the directory page
  • More pleasing profile view
  • Larger, clearer profile pictures
  • Profile pictures rotated automatically if needed
  • Only shows callings to whom members are assigned
  • More appealing, simpler forms
  • Slide-out navigation drawer
  • Users can change their own wards if they move within the same site/stake
  • General and important bug fixes