We are currently doing trials with the Directory System that’s been developed by people at North Pacific Yearly Meeting: https://destinymanifestation.com/npym/admin_system/
We’re grateful to John Gotts of NPYM for helping us with this.
Reports:
These are the reports it offers without being logged into the admin system database. If you have a password and have logged into the admin system, you should logout before using these:
Show Committees:
https://destinymanifestation.com/npym/showCommittees.php
Show Directory:
https://destinymanifestation.com/npym/showDirectory.php
To log into this, you’ll need to already be entered as an attender at one of the meetings in the database, and have an email address in it. If you haven’t created an account to log in, it will offer that ability via email.
Show Yearly Meeting Notes History:
https://destinymanifestation.com/npym/showHistory.php
“History was a very recent addition to the system this past year to capture essential information about past annual sessions. If you look at https://npym.org/?q=content/annual-session-archives (our past and current approach to archiving documents related to sessions) and scroll to the bottom there is a link to the new history summary presentation.” – J Gotts
Show Meetings:
https://destinymanifestation.com/npym/showMeetings.php
Download:
The original system install files can be downloaded here:
https://npym.org/npym_admin_system/
The following is excerpted from the installation instructions. While some of it is a bit technical, it does provide guidelines for how the info should be loaded:
LOADING ATTENDER AND MEETING DATA
Three scripts are provided to facilitate initial loading of meeting, attender and meeting contact information from spreadsheet-sourced data files. These three scripts may be accessed directly by a logged in system administrator. They may also be accessed from buttons provided in relevant pages of the admin system. Those buttons are “import attenders”, “import meetings”, “import meeting contacts”.
Loading data must be done in a particular order:
1) Load data to describe any meetings that are not yet known to the system and that will be referenced by new attender data.
2) Load attender data
3) Load meeting contact information.
(script: ./admin_system/upload_meetings.php)
(script: ./admin_system/upload_attenders.php)
(script: ./admin_system/upload_meeting_contacts.php)
When you navigate to one of the upload…php scripts, they provide further guidance about the nature of the expected uploaded data, and provide a form in which you can identify a file to be uploaded.
Three files are provided as starting points to define meeting, attender and contact input data fields. • ./admin_system/includes/sample_meetings_upload.tsv
• ./admin_system/includes/sample_attenders_upload.tsv
• ./admin_system/includes/sample_meeting_contacts_upload.tsv
Download these three files, and click on the downloaded files to open them in Excel or OpenOffice.
Note: you do Not need to fill in all of the blanks in a row of data. Only basic identifying information is required. A recommended approach would be to create a few rows of data and run an upload to see the results. Warning and error messages will help you pin-point issues that were detected and reference the row of the input file for each case.
The first meeting upload file should contain a record for your yearly meeting, followed by a record for a quarterly meeting under the care of that yearly meeting, followed by a record for a meeting or worship group under that care of that quarterly meeting. You may choose to load records for all quarters within the yearly meeting in that initial upload, or not. The main thing to consider is that references may only be made to a yearly meeting, or quarterly meeting, or meeting, or worship group if that entity has previously been loaded into the system.
Attender data may be loaded for any meetings or worship groups that have already been loaded.
Meeting contact data may be loaded to connect previously loaded attender data to previously loaded meeting data.
If you re-run an upload containing previously uploaded data the duplicate rows will be skipped with appropriate warning messages.
When first getting started with data uploads, you should view the initially uploaded data through the admin system user interface to get a feel for where to find that data and a sense of how it may be amended.
All uploaded data may be edited, deleted, or supplemented through the administration pages of the admin system. Navigate to the area of interest using the left sidebar of the admin system interface.
Under normal use of the admin system, data is rarely/never uploaded in bulk. Rather, it is entered manually. However, if a new meeting or worship group needs to be added in the future and attender data can be supplied for bulk upload – that option remains available.
REPORTS
There are internal reports available to a logged in admin system user, and there are publicly accessible reports. The publicly accessible reports are provided through the four php files that exist outside of the admin_system directory:
• showDirectory.php
• showMeetings.php
• showCommittees.php • showHistory.php
Only “showDirectory.php” requires user login, as it displays attender contact data. The other reports are considered to be public information that does not require login. If your yearly meeting determines that those other reports should require login, your web site administrator (if they know PHP) should be able to copy relevant code from showDirectory and apply it for use in the other cases.
The manner in which showDirectory users gain access to the attender report is as follows:
- A new user enters their preferred email address and clicks either “Forgot Password” or
“Register” - If the supplied email address is not yet associated with any uploaded attender an error message
tells the user that they are not in the database. [The approach here is that only persons who are recognized attenders should have access to the information in the database about other attenders.] - If the supplied email address is associated with an uploaded attender an email is sent to that email address with a link to permit the user to establish a new or updated password for future access to the system.
- After the user receives the welcome email from the system, clicks a contained link, and sets a new password, they are invited to log into the system.
- At that point (or after initially supplying a valid username and password) the user may qualify the type of attender report they want to view (in showDirectory) – to view the entire attender data of the yearly meeting, all attenders within a Quarter, or all attenders of a specific meeting or worship group.
Re-install for upgrade
When the system is initially installed, a “config.php” file is created in the /includes folder, based upon information provided during that process.
The install package does not contain a config.php file, so a new install file may be unzipped to replace a previous install. The old config.php file will be detected and used.