We have some questions that hope you can shed us some light:
In our school, we have several activity (event) open to whole families (not only individual student), so just wondering if it is easy to modify an activity can be registered by a family? If I do so, will it block me to upgrade to later version of Gibbon? Or, should I make it a new module like “Family event” to make it?
In our school, all jobs are done by parents, and we count their working hours as part of the tuition. A volunteer need to sign-up to some activities, then sign-in/sign-out in the day of activity. In Gibbon, I originally want to add them to be “Staff”, but seems not quite suitable. So I’m wondering if it is easy to add a new category like “Volunteer”? (so I can hire a programmer to do it.) A “Volunteer”, I think it should be a registered user first, then it can sign up some activities as volunteer. In the day of the activity, he/she needs to sign-in and sing-out, so we can record their attendance, then reflect in the invoice later.
Thanks for your post. Would you mind letting me know what school this is for, and what stage of deployment you are at? If this causes confidentiality issues, the don’t worry!
For question one, we are on a feature freeze pending release of v10 in late June, and so cannot easily add what would be quite a large change. Once the release is done, we could look at this as a possibility. If you coded it, you could contribute it to the Gibbon Core project on GitHub, to make sure it was not erased on the next upgrade (as you suggest above, it could lead to issues). The other option you point out, making a separate module, is certainly a feasible route, and would let you follow your own timeline. It would be great, if you do it as a module, if you could share back to the community. Either way, we are happy to advise on how to get started with a module.
For question 2, you could easily create a role called Volunteer to hold the relevant users. This would not give you much functionality, beyond being able to export their names, etc. You could do the tracking in a spreadseet outside Gibbon. Or, as you point out, with an outside coder, you could have a custom module that allows them to track their hours, interacts with Gibbon’s invoicing functionality, etc. Again, we are happy to help with advise, should you need it.
Thanks for all great information and this great system. We are Torrance Chinese School (torrancecs dot com), located in Torrance, California, USA. Our focus is to provide Chinese education to families around our communities. With more and more demand to variety of Chinese classes, our current school management work-flow can not handle it efficiently any more.
Our IT systems now is Word + Excel. I’m a software engineer, mostly in Windows and C++, and now taking some time to work on web/cloud programming. I’m ok with PHP, and I’m looking for some PHP programmers among our school volunteers to help at this moment.
We currently have Gibbon running in our web hosting as a test site, so far, it does serves most functions we need. I’ll take your suggestions and start to trace the codes and see if we could implement the modules we need and hopefully that can also contribute to this project.
Thanks for the information, it is really useful to know. Gibbon does work in Traditional Chinese (because I am HK based ; )…but if anyone wants to turn that translation into Simplified Chinese, then your users could access the system in either form of Chinese. Let me know if you have any further questions. Thanks for choosing Gibbon!