All good.

Does Spearhead do any sort of online management of events or members, or is the new WordPress site basically a "marketing" site?

I don't manage the web app for the 15, someone else does. But I'll shoot him a message to let him know the cert for it is invalid

It's an alias for the15association.org. Looks like the SSL cert is no longer valid for the alias/forwarding site

The 15's site is old timey PHP that is a straight up workhorse. I talked with the eng who coded it about open sourcing it, but I ended up writing something myself instead.

Oh! And we're doing our part to make the web fun again. There are easter eggs, april fools jokes built in, little css fireworks on NYE or snowflakes during the winter.

The final thing I want to point out, that so many groups are missing, is allowing users to request events be added to our calendar. This way, our web app is not just for running the club, it is a community hub for our community to see what other events are happening locally that are of-interest

One thing I will say is fortunate is PMP and Mailchimp provide csv data exports, so we can import users, memberships, and mailing list recipients very easily.

The app even handles special-case attendees. Constant no-shows result in a user's access to RSVPing taken away. Individuals who need extra attention have a set of notes pop up in the app when the doorman signs them into the event.

Even end of month reporting, for finances (tracked via purchases and renewals in the app) and membership is in-app.

The idea is to use the app to effectively run the club faster, cheaper, and more lean. That way, the board can focus on putting on events and investing time into those.

QR codes are sent in emails to attendees, which get scanned (in-app) and can only be scanned by an authorized user logged into the app.

Board members can write all attendees to an event if anything has to be passed along to them, or to volunteers to coordinate prior to the event.

Thanks to being able to schedule jobs, we can now remind guys of upcoming events, tell the president to queue up the e-blast, set up temporary "doorman" access to scan guys into events

The site itself looks fairly straight forward.

Where things get fun is that users can now buy tickets to paid events, rsvp for free events, and sign up for volunteer shifts all on an event's page.

The mailing list involves a few clicks to choose the layout and the events/posts.

Aside from the monetary cost, the time cost of using these tools was horrific. Sending an e-blast, updating the web site, and updating events is a monthly job that takes 10 hours or so. Managing social media also takes a significant time commitment.

The solution was to unify and automate.

We used to use EventBrite for events, but having to send about 10% of everything to them is just too much. Last year for our anniversary party we lost out on about $1500 because of reliance on 3rd parties.

Wordpress aside, we also had to pay $35/month to send one email a month to our subscribers via Mailchimp.

Also, users randomly get unsubscribed from it when they renew their membership, due to the PMP/Mailchimp plugin deciding to do this randomly.

On top of this, you have the usual unending botnet brute force attacks that take place on every Wordpress site at all hours of the day everyday. There are plugins that (sort of) manage this, but they frequently break and are poorly written.

Maintaining Wordpress sucks, basically.

We pay about $200 (CAD) annually for Events Calendar Pro, a plugin that pretends posts are events, which requires global CSS overrides to try to style, which only needs to be paid for if you want to schedule recurring events.

The functionality for this plugin took me a few hours to code myself.

For the past 4 years, "Paid Memberships Pro" (a free plugin, although they use dark patterns to make sure you don't actually know that, so most people end up paying for their premium support just to find a download link) has randomly unsubscribed members from our mailing list.

First, for anything beyond a blog, Wordpress is dogshit. Yes, there are a litany of plugins, many paid, but they are almost universally poorly written, conflict with eachother, suck to customize, and they perpetually break.