Hi everyone. I’m evaluating Gibbon for a small seminary in the UK. Being small, the paid-for systems are financially prohibitive. Gibbon seems like a very well put-together system that would do most of what is needed, and is a lot easier to use than many I have seen.
However, an obvious difference from the typical user is that the college only has adult learners, and therefore there is no need for the parent fields in application forms or as a ‘role’ within the system. I appreciate that Gibbon developers would not want to put effort into removing them, but how difficult would it be to do this myself? Is there a simple code edit or are they tightly integrated into the whole system?
Many thanks for all the hard work that has gone into this development.
Hi Ed, welcome to the Gibbon community. Gibbon is pretty flexible, so I know some people have had success adapting it to use with a college. As you’ve noted, the application form assumes a family and parents are present. One alternate is to use the Public Registration form, which has much less fields, but allows students to self-register their account. The default status is Pending Approval, and you can recieve notifications when people create users. You could then manage their account and ask them to use the Data Updater feature, which lets users submit additional information once they are logged in.
Our current development goals include an overhaul of the application system, so its quite possible in the upcoming version to use this feature to create an application form that doesn’t have parent fields.
Hi Ed, thanks for your kind words, and welcome to the community. Although it is not possible to remove the parent role, you can run an installation that essentially ignores it, without any custom coding. This is how https://gorillapd.org works, for example.
Do you plan on entering student data into the system yourself, or will you use self-service (which you can enable under Admin > User Admin > Public Registration Settings) to allow students to sign up for their accounts?
Well, I say that you’re both marvellous! Thank you very much. It certainly wouldn’t be a hardship entering users ourselves, as this is what we presently do (and we don’t have that many). I’ll take a look at the options you suggest.
