Integration with club websites / forums

[stew]

Hi there,

I’m the newly elected ‘web administrator’ of the Rover Coupe Owners Club. Crossmember was demoed to the club at the NEC and we are at a stage to seriously investigate this as an option (I believe you’ve been in contact with Dave recently).

My question is about how easy it would be to integrate (or have some access to) the membership details with a website or forum. The ideal scenario would ‘Single-Sign-On’ so that members can login to either Crossmember, the club website or forum with the same details, and it just magically knows whether or not they are a fully fledged club member.

Even if there was just a simple way our own website could ‘ask’ Crossmember (or interrogate its database) to determine whether they are a member or not that would be sufficient, even if the usernames or passwords have to be different.

I hope this makes sense. It looks like a potentially great time saving tool, and if there is any option for the kind of integration described I think it would really be of benefit to so many clubs out there.

Also if there is any other way of looking at the problem of access-controlling content based on membership that would work with Crossmember we’re open to suggestions. I think everyone is keen to get things up and running in our club as soon as we can now we have some momentum!

Thanks,
Stew

[wwwebbers]

Hello Stew,

As it stands today, there is no facility to do the integration you’re talking about, and I think we have to consider carefully what integration would mean. What I will ensure is that the access control to Crossmember data is secure and contained and therefore something to be extremely careful over.

The reason that I selected the method of logging in to Crossmember for club members (not club officials) that I implemented – the process of email authentication is for three reasons:
1. From experience, most members do not remember their password and so email authentication each time removes this need.
2. Accessing your own membership record would only typically be done once a year for most members and therefore they would definitely forget their password!
3. Membership renewal can be performed without the need to login to your membership record.

However, that said, I have been thinking about, and do want to develop a REST service that would allow club websites to automatically query Crossmember over a secure HTTPS link to request non-sensitive information. For example …

Many club websites have individual logins for members. This can give a significant overhead to the club administrator to both approve new registrations on the website, and to ensure that their privileges are revoked (or downgraded) when the membership becomes overdue or lapses. Having a REST service such as this would allow club websites to query the existing membership status and determine the appropriate privileges to grant.

What does everyone else think about this?

Brian.

[stew]

Thanks for responding – that all makes sense to me. I feel a REST service would be very beneficial and it’s good to know you are thinking about adding this in future. I can’t see it being a huge amount of work for me to implement something on our website that could call out a REST service if one were available. I think for now we’d be able to find a way to make it work without.

My only other question would be is there any way for fully authenticated administrators or club secretaries to get an export of the data in Crossmember? e.g. in an Excel or CSV file format.

[demo-pegasus]

Ah – I just discovered the ‘backup’ button which seems to do the kind of export I was thinking of. Thanks again – I think we will be in touch soon.

[wwwebbers]

Sorry for the delay Stew, but yes, that’s exactly what the ‘Backup’ functionality is for. The data belongs to the Club, and Clubs need to have their own Business Continuity Plans. The backup functionality ensures that Clubs can gain access to all their data anytime they wish.

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