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Owner FAQs
Who should use Chapter?
Chapter is a self-hosted event registration platform for organizations with local chapters.
See the Vision Statement and README for more on the purpose and intended audience.
What is the terminology used by Chapter, e.g. instance, chapter, organization?
The vocabulary used for the project is described in the Terminology section of the project's overview page.
Are there any dependencies or 3rd party services involved?
- Email: Organizations may relay transaction emails originating from the instance through a remote SMTP server, including:
- your organization's existing SMTP relaying services
- 3rd party service (ex. Amazon SES, Mailgun, Mailjet, Sendgrid, Postmark, Mandrill, etc).
- Though, it may be possible, localhost email relaying is not suggested or supported.
- User-generated files/uploads: may require a 3rd-party S3-compatible storage service. Instances which are self-hosting with a locally mounted read-write file system can opt for local file storage.
How much will it cost? Is it really free?
The Chapter application is free, but there will likely be some cost to run / host the application.
We are building it for nonprofits, including our own at freeCodeCamp, but the application is not limited to nonprofits. Anyone can use the software for free under our license.
There is no paid tier. There are no advertisements. Your organization gets the same tool we're using.
Organizations may be able to leverage existing hosting services for little or no extra cost. Otherwise, organizations can expect fees from $5-25 USD per month.
Your organization will pay for, own, and control the Chapter instance and any associated accounts and data.
- Web Hosting: For simplicity, a "1-click" host will be suggested for organizations without an existing, capable hosting platform with a cost of as little as $10 USD per month. If your organization has existing hardware or cloud infrastructure, then your administrator should be able to provide an accurate estimate. In some cases, Chapter could be hosted in parallel at no extra hosting cost.
- Email: Organizations with existing SMTP or transaction-based email services can expect little to no extra cost, but this depends on the volume of notifications (reminders, account notices, etc) which originate from your Chapter instance. Otherwise, the cost of a new 3rd party email sending server can range from free (up to 62,000 emails per month) to per 1000 emails, to $15 USD per month for up to 100,000 emails per month. Costs would increase based on volume of emails sent per month.
What are the minimum hardware requirements to run Chapter?
Requirements will vary based on usage, but we anticipate an instance of Chapter can be run on the lower / cheaper tiers of most hosting platforms.
How many local chapters can we support as our Chapter instance scales up?
There is no built in limits to the number of chapters. However, your organization will need to provide hosting with enough resources to accommodate any higher levels of traffic and resource requirements.
The hosting resources and marginal costs of supporting each additional local chapters on the same infrastructure should be very low. So, hosting hundreds of local chapters and their thousands of combined users on a single instance should not be prohibitively more resource or cost intensive than hosting a few local chapters.
Can Chapter be run on our existing hardware / server?
Yes, if your organization has an existing web server infrastructure running an up-to-date Linux operating system.
Can Chapter be run under our existing web domain? Or, is a sub-domain or new domain needed?
Running Chapter within a sub-directory / sub-path of an existing website will not be initially supported. A sub-domain, like chapter.freecodecamp.org, is the expected configuration.
Our organization is new and doesn't have any chapters yet. Is this tool for us?
If you don't have chapters yet, we recommend starting with some of the social network event tools. This will also help people discover your event.
Chapter is designed more for organizations that already have existing participants in their events, and existing awareness of their communities.
How soon will Chapter be available for my organization to install?
We don't have a hard launch date, but you can watch our MVP project board to check in on the progress. Once the "open" MVP issues are completed freeCodeCamp will begin initial with their local study group chapters to work toward a stable public release.
Can freeCodeCamp provide a Service Level Agreement (SLA)?
At this time, we can't enter into any contracts or make guarantees.
However, as an open-source project, anybody will be able to create issues and request features, and our project contributors will help as much as we can.
If your organization has developers, we would welcome their open source contributions to the project as well.
What technical skills or knowledge is needed to install Chapter?
The initial setup and configuration of an instance of Chapter will require the experience of a system administrator, IT administrator, DevOps, and/or someone with a solid knowledge of web hosting and working with 3rd party software-as-a-service applications.
Chapter is built using popular open source tools like Node.js, Next.js, PostgreSQL, and Docker.
Is there technical support?
A best-effort at support will be provided by our development community volunteers at the Chapter project's "Issues" queue.
How does an owner differ from an administrator?
Each instance will have only one owner and this role will have the ability to perform anything functions within the instance.
The owner will be a "super-administrator" in that they will be able to change instance-level configuration, such as integration keys for 3rd party services, inviting or disabling administrators.
The administrators will not be able to add other administrators or change the role or permissions of the owner.
How is the Chapter application kept up to date?
Chapter will tag minor and major releases which can be deployed by a series of manual steps by your organization's IT staff / owner on a schedule they define.
Why are our Chapter instance's emails going to into recipients' spam folders?
The most common reason for spam is missing or incorrect DNS validation records. This typically involves adding SPF and DKIM records. The email service you've configured to work with Chapter will have documentation on how to properly setup these records.