Hello, we are evaluating Gibbon v30 to see if it is feasible for our admission process and online tuition fee collection. We don’t need to manage classes or courses because we use Moodle for our online education platform.
Our challenges:
Potential adult student fills out a very simple admission application (name, address, contacts, which program they would like to enroll) We do not require any documents or prior education because we offer separate enrichment courses.
OUR PROBLEM: When we tried this in our self-hosted Gibbon instance, all the submitted applications are with status “incomplete”. This will be very confusing for the applicants because it conveys that they still have to do something. It seems like it requires for an Admissions Administrator to go and change the status to “Pending” without touching any other data. QUESTION 1: Can the status be “Pending” upon submission and not “Incomplete”?
QUESTION 2: Are there any “must have” fields so the application can have a “Pending” status upon submission?
If we set a small Application Submission Fee, it looks like after the submission of the form, the system does not redirect to paying that fee although Enable Online Payment if turned On under School Admin > Finance Settings and we have our Stripe gateways setup and tested. QUESTION 3: Can the system continue to the Application Submission Fee online payment.
Since those are adult students, there is no parent or family record. We managed for the students to see their invoices by adding View Invoices_mine permission to the Student role. We cannot figure out how to email the invoices to the students even though Create Invoicee option is turned on in the admission form. QUESTION 4: Is there a way to email the invoices to the students since there is no parent not family record?
Since we offer only individual online courses, we have defined the Year Groups to match the names of the courses. (not to mention the length of the name field is very short). The students don’t really need form groups. QUESTION 5: Is there a way to enroll students only to a School Year and Year Group and not to a form group and still be able to send invoices for their tuition fees?
Finding answer to those question will help us determine if Gibbon is for us or we should look elsewhere.
Thanks for your questions! If you have some coding experience, a few of the features you mentioned can be customized. Here are some suggestions and points to check:
1.) The status should display as “Pending” (not “Incomplete”) if the form was submitted correctly. Could you share some screenshots of your form builder settings and the form itself? That will help us see whether it’s a system bug or just a configuration issue.
2.) The redirection to the online payment page should work properly if the payment gateway is set up correctly and the application form status is “Pending” after submission. It sounds like the missing redirect may be related to how the submission status is being handled. Please also share a screenshot of your payment settings so we can confirm if everything looks right.
3.) At the moment, the system doesn’t support sending invoices directly to students, as there’s no parent or family record linked. However, there’s a workaround: you can enter the student’s email in the Company field. Invoices are automatically sent to the email address listed for the company. You can also use String Replacement to rename “Company” to something that better fits your use case.
4.) Form Groups are an essential part of Gibbon’s structure and workflow. To simplify things, you can create one form group per year group and rename it according to your needs. This setup will let you easily send tuition fee invoices to all students within that group.
I hope these pointers help you move forward with your setup. Thank you.
This is what I discovered since my post and this is how I handle things:
Regarding questions 1-3:
I discovered that my application submission email template had an error - Twig was throwing and error and that was reverting the status to Incomplete. Here is how the error was introduced:
If I double-click over a variable from the Available Variables in the Template section to select, copy and paste it in the visual Body editor, it surrounds that text with … tags, that are only visible in HTML mode and not in Visual mode of the editor. If the tags end up within the curly brackets of a variable, Twig will error out, it will not be able to generate the admission email and will revert the status back to Incomplete. Fixing the email template took care of the status to be Pending after an application submission and continued with the application fee screen if fee is required.
It will be nice those templates to have some validation when they are edited and not to allow to update them if there are errors. Showing the error to the end user who is editing the template will help correct the issue instead of involving a system admin to check for PHP errors on the server.
Regarding question 4:
I created two triggers in the database to copy the personal info into the company info upon insert of an invoicee and update of a student. This took care of the invoice emails with only DB changes without any changes in the codebase
Regarding question 5:
I did some more reading and figured that a form group is a must for invoicing.
Hi @arman
That sounds brilliant. Thanks for sharing a detailed explanation. I think it’s a great idea to be able to detect and show the error message while updating email templates. I have added it to our development list and will update you here once we have worked it out. Thank you.
