One of my main goals since getting the portal up and running was to make it more organisation agnostic so that others could run it. We received an email a few weeks ago from someone from Woodcraft Guild of the ACT who wanted to use our access system. This gave me the motivation I needed to finish off the changes necessary.
This weekend I copied the portal code into my personal GitHub account and renamed it to “MemberMatters”. I then made a whole bunch of changes and removed almost all of the HSBNE specific stuff. I made a lot of stuff configurable with settings stored in the database, tidied up the deployment process and wrote some detailed documentation for getting started with it.
In the next week or two I will convert our instance of the portal over to using this “new” MemberMatters software. From a user experience point of view, you won’t notice any changes and it will still be called the HSBNE Portal and hosted on portal.hsbne.org.
Moving forward I will no longer be maintaining the “hsbneportal” software and will be directing my efforts to “MemberMatters”. You can access the MemberMatters public GitHub repo here.
I just wanted to clarify a few things and hopefully re-assure some people I’m not taking away the portal.
The current “hsbneportal” software is licensed under MIT which means it is and forever will be open source (legally nothing can change this!).
The current version will remain on the official HSBNE GitHub and will remain archived. Regardless of what happens to MemberMatters, this archived version will stay under HSBNE control.
The new “MemberMatters” software will continue to be licensed under MIT and therefore remain open source (legally nothing can change this!).
My primary focus while developing the MemberMatters software will be for HSBNE use. Secondarily to that, I will try to make it as universal as possible so other organisations (especially hackerspaces) can use it.
HSBNE can make a fork of MemberMatters on the official HSBNE account so that they can always maintain their own independent copy.
I will soon be moving the new MM GitHub repository into it’s own organisation and inviting previous contributors to it. That means one person (ie me) won’t have total control over it.
I understand that this software is important for HSBNE and some people may feel like HSBNE is “losing control”. I just ask that you remember I’ve spent hundreds of hours working on this so I feel like this is something I should be allowed to do (and will also allow other hackerspaces to benefit!).
Sorry for not posting these things before I made all the changes and causing any undue anxiety or worry in anyone. Feel free to message me any other questions or concerns.
The HSBNE portal has now been switched over to use the new MemberMatters software. I’ve tested out all of the customisations and everything seems to be working well. If you have any issues please DM me on discord. I forgot to implement a custom logo so we’ll have to stick with the MemberMatters logo for a short while until I fix that.
