HISTORY

The Blekinge student union paid for a membership tracking service, it
was working very good and had lots of nice features. We used hardly
any of them. When investigating posible cost cuts the membership
tracking system was an obvious candidate as we only needed a bare
minimum. However, going for a classic approach and tuck all names and
addresses into a spread sheet wasn't really an option.

Soon enough the discussion began to write a web application to take
care of the actual interface towards some kind of database. During
initial planning we decided to mimic the parts of the proprietary
system we used and to provide an API to be a drop in replacement for
the old system that exposed itself via a web service.

During the autumn 2012 things was considered pretty much done. The
paid service was stopped and by the 1st of January 2013 we would be
out of the old agreement any how.

Spring 2013 saw the first version of the system. The code wasn't
really good and the database design horrible in some parts but we did
our clean ups and made the code available to the public under a AGPL3
license.

At the time of writing (autumn 2013) there are a bunch of known bugs
and issues but the system is in daily use both via direct web
interaction and via the API.

Code can be found at https://gitlab.bthstudent.se/msys/msys, the
license to adhere to is AGPLv3. See also the documentation about
licenses in the file COPYING.


INSTALL AND USAGE

This code is clean PHP5, HTML, CSS and JavaScript. To execute it you
need a standard webserver with PHP and a MySQL server like
instance. Some development is done with MariaDB as backend, just to
try it out.

git clone the repository (https://gitlab.bthstudent.se/msys/msys.git),
set Apache to serve the public_html directory. Copy example-config.php
to local-config.php and add the relevant database information there.

Use the MySQL commandline client and read the db/db.sql file.
  mysql -u USERNAME -pPASSWORD databasename< db/db.sql

The database user and a database must be in place before, the user
needs most privs to operate. For experienced users you could tweak the
privileges settings to your liking - the system does however try to
update the database in the background when new versions are installed
into the code tree. Using GRANT ALL on the databse in question is a
good idea for that reason.

Point your webclient to the system and login with admin as user and
nimda as password.

Things to do at first use.
    1. Add a new admin user and remove the default one. Or at least
       change the default password.
    2. Add a payment type.
    3. Add a membership type.
    4. Add a period and set the value of that period.