Software Needs

This page describes software projects which would be helpful to Dallas Makerspace.

Improve Membership Statistics Page (Paul Brown)

Current membership statistics page: https://dallasmakerspace.org/misc/membership_table.php

Requirements:

• Add month selector and only show relevant yearly memberships within the last 12 months.
• Add stats for:
  • New yearly memberships
  • Family memberships
  • Regular monthly memberships
  • Net increase over last month
• Add a graph for net increase by month.

Solution (work in progress):

• Link: http://membership-numbers.herokuapp.com/
• Github: https://github.com/pawl/dms-membership-report

Energy Saving Software (Paul Brown)

Requirements:

• Scrape the Texas Smart Meter site and add the information to the database so we can track our progress on saving electricity: https://github.com/ChrisAlvares/SmartMeterTexasPhantomJS
• Remotely control WIFI thermostats by creating a script to scrape and control the WIFI thermostat website. (or use an API?, brooks applied for beta access)
• Allow triggering the temperature change with a POST request. (this will allow other applications to change the temperature)
• Add functionality to G-cal Manager to send a post request when a class is about to occur.

Calendar Replacement (Paul Brown)

Requirements:

• Community events management (allow users to submit events and have them approved by the PR group)
• Must be responsive and look good on mobile screens
• Allow adding events for specific rooms
• Automatically push events to facebook, eventbrite, google calendar, and meetup
  • We also need it to remove events when events are deleted or cancelled

Idea #1: Create an add-on for The Events Calendar that publishes events to facebook, meetup, and eventbrite. The eventbrite add-on looks like it can push events, but not automatically. The facebook add-on only imports events. And there is no meetup.com add-on.

Idea #2: Modify Hacker Dojo’s events calendar to suit our needs. Unfortunately, this requires using google app engine and doesn’t have as much out of the box functionality as idea #1.

Idea #3: Use Full Calendar for the calendar’s front-end. Create a backend for the calendar with an approval process for submitting new events. Then add the functionality for the calendar to read and write events to/from Facebook, Eventbrite, Google Calendar, and meetup.com.

Idea #4: Create a program which only finds and fixes the differences between google calendar, meetup, facebook, and eventbrite. (could be a good step #1)

Solution: Paul made an web app for this: http://www.calendaradmin.com

Volunteer Opportunities Tracker (Paul Brown)

Requirements:

• At the top it needs to say “This is not a TODO list for you to use to mandate other volunteers to do work for you.”
• It will allow users to create a “Volunteer Opportunity”. A volunteer opportunity will be a task the user is willing to own (see to completion themselves if necessary), but the owner needs help from the group to complete it.
• Allow non-owners to attach themselves to a task (or get officially involved with a task).
• Allow the owner to provide updates, possibly send reminders to the people involved. The owner will post updates on progress and who is helping.
• Allow users to comment on tasks (also allow users to upvote/downvote comments)

Idea #1: Add the functionality to Maker Manager. Create a table for comments, tasks, and users involved with tasks.

Solution: We’ve been using Trello for this.

Cancellation Link (Paul Brown)

Requirements:

• Allow an user to go directly to the cancellation page in our billing system (WHMCS) with a link.
• The URL would be: https://dallasmakerspace.org/accounts/clientarea.php?action=cancel&id= (id needs to be filled with their product ID, which will need to be looked up by the script)

Idea #1: Make the page on Maker Manager and make it similar to the Billing function under the site/ controller.

Paypal Export Parser for Quickbooks (Paul Brown)

Requirements:

• Add transaction numbers to the IIF file which comes from paypal or convert the CSV to a format which can import.
• Needs to automatically change the debit and credit accounts when appropriate. For example, laser fees don’t go to membership dues (which is the default).

Solution: https://github.com/pawl/dms-iif-parser (still a work in progress, just hacked something together that barely works)

Add Categories To “How Did You Hear About Us?” Page (Paul Brown)

Requirements:

• The page needs to allow sorting the answers for “How did you hear about us?” into categories and creating new categories. I want to keep the “How did you hear about us?” field as a text field so we can get as much data as possible.

Idea #1:

Add two database tables to a database:

• Table 1
  • Category ID
  • Category Name
• Table 2
  • WHMCS ID
  • Category ID

Add dropdowns to the “How Did You Hear About Us?” page for categories and a new page for creating categories.

Improve Handling of Family Member Badges In MakerManager (Paul Brown)

Requirements:

• Make family member add-ons consistent in WHMCS. Some members have a special $60 product without any add-ons. This makes it difficult for the software to run a single query to find family members without some awkward special cases.
• Create a new table for family members. There will be a one-to-many relationship between the main person on the account and family members.
• Modify “Badge Request” page to show another drop-down when a family member is selected.
  • Ask for the family member’s name and badge#.
  • Query WHMCS for whether the person has a family membership.

Idea #1:

• The “badges” code in MakerManager will need to be modified:
  • Controller: https://github.com/pawl/MakerManager/blob/master/protected/controllers/BadgesController.php
  • Model: https://github.com/pawl/MakerManager/blob/master/protected/models/Badges.php
  • Form View: https://github.com/pawl/MakerManager/blob/master/protected/views/badges/_form.php
  • Admin View: https://github.com/pawl/MakerManager/blob/master/protected/views/badges/admin.php
• This might help, since we need the Request Badges page to add records for two different models: http://www.yiiframework.com/wiki/19/how-to-use-a-single-form-to-collect-data-for-two-or-more-models/
• The admin view needs to have way to show nested badges or we need to create a separate set of views for family members.
  • Example for a nested view is here: http://yiiwheels.2amigos.us/site/grid#relationalcolumn

Solution: Now we’re limiting the number of active badges to the number of active products + addons.

Allow Individual-Door Access Control in MakerManager

We will soon need to have 2 separate 4-door access controllers. We need to be able to have fine-grained access. Requirements:

• Eliminate the dropdown box box Active/Deactivated
• Add checkboxes for access to different areas:
  • Main entry
  • Warehouse (woodworking direct entry, warehouse general, warehouse back door, entry through classroom)
  • IT/Server Room (limited access)
  • Secondary entrance (limited access)