Need long-term solution for legacy site

[shaneniebergall]

Met with Katie and she walked me through how the Community Life team uses the legacy site to manage members and communication.

Here's my understanding of what capabilities they rely on, for consideration when/if we replace the legacy site with something newer:

• Adding members (or changing addresses) triggers emails to neighborhood leaders to tell them to manually add the person to the corresponding google group. A new member will also trigger email to Dianna to add them to mailchimp (weekly newsletter)
• Mike Talvola tracks new visitors via the visitor calendar and prints name tags (auto-fills based on new visitor activity)
• Seeing a dump of all emails per google group (to verify someone is included)
• Email audit checks to ensure members are correctly in mailchimp (weekly newsletter), google groups, and legacy database
• Need a receptacle for members-only documents
• PDF exports of member directory (complete or phone-only list), and optionally for each neighborhood.

Currently David Barker is manually importing legacy into breeze every week to keep the systems in sync - this is not sustainable.

The Stewardship group is happily using breeze, just need to get above for Community Life.

@GrumpyOldTroll Katie told me she sent out an email recently that documented her concerns/needs of Community Life, and problems with Breeze. Can you forward/attach here?

Also @GrumpyOldTroll - are you still concerned that legacy site could get shut down at any second due to PHP version, or are you happy with your workaround?

[GrumpyOldTroll]

The php version is an ongoing concern, I'm only marginally happy with my workaround. The hosting provider won't turn it off, so the first round is fine, but it can't be considered a long-term stable fix. It's not going to be safe for a year I think, and it's hard to guess what day a known vulnerability will be auto-scanned and it'll start serving Russian malware or worse (again).

I think the message from Katie was this one, on April 6th 2019 to the breeze group:

Hi Breeze folks,

I thought it would be helpful if we in Community Life expressed our normal workflow and outputs from the current database so we can consider how we will do the same work with Breeze. Please let me know if you have any questions!

Membership -

1. We print visitor name (only) lists from the database. We use that list on Sundays at checkin. We need to also be able to print a list of names of new friends.
2. We can print any name tag from the database as there is a template already made.
3. The ability to print the membership list and contact info currently exists in a preformatted pdf for members to have by their phone. Hard to imagine people use a phone list but lots do.

Database sync and Neighborhood Networks:

1. When someone changes status from visitor to new friend, or changes address, an email is automatically generated and sent to Neighborhood@ so I can add that person to a Neighborhood.
2. To confirm a person has consistent information on all three lists we manage (MailChimp for email, neighborhood network (in Gmail), and the database, I run a sync report in the database (currently called "examine email issues"). With that report, I can fix conflicts. There are roughly 200 issues at any time. Most are visitors or expired new friends. But that's because I manage it regularly. ;-)
3. We have a preformatted list of names and contact information that NN leaders can access and print.
4. Email correspondence: I'm raising the issue here because we keep hearing we can send our emails from Breeze. True for one-offs, but not fully true for groups: For example with NN: leaders and members can communicate to their NN with an alias. When someone "replies all", everyone in the NN receives it. When Breeze sends to a group, it only lists the sender and receiver, not the whole group, even if they are cc'ed. So neighborhoods would not get responses that are fairly common discussion threads. Similarlyall aliases for groups such as Comm Life, Share, etc, Breeze isn't currently set up for discussion thread emails as it doesn't include cc's in the outbound email. However it's great when we want to do something like send an invitation to a group and don't need them to reply all.

Unrelated but important - what's the plan for the library? The entire library is catalogued in the current database. Sylvia has gone to incredible length to include details of every book. The catalog is searchable currently.

That's all I can think of right now.

Thanks!! Katie

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I think it just got one response, from me:

Hi Katie,

Thanks, this is a wonderfully useful list, and I'm interested to hear what people think about how hard or easy each of these use cases is to handle with a different method that doesn't rely on the database.

I agree Sylvia has done a huge amount of useful work with cataloging the library that would be good not only to keep, but also to make more easily accessible.

David was doing some work on importing the library content to a wordpress plugin that manages library catalogues. I think it's stalled, but I'm not sure where it got stuck, or what the problem was, I think I just stopped getting updates and it slipped out of my attention. David, could you give an update or a post-mortem on that?

Also: sorry I'm so far behind on working out the automation with Breeze.

Kind regards, Jake