Deprecation tracker: Alternatives?

[Nowa-Ammerlaan]

Since we don't have the time/personnel to fix the long-standing serious issues, we are looking for a new membership-administration solution. Opening this tracker issue to keep track of possible alternatives and communicate this also with other (downstream) organisations.

Possible alternatives:

1. Tendenci: It can do basically everything (membership administration, polls, chapter administration, newsletters, forums, you name it). But it is not possible to pay membership fees via iDEAL. There is a payment backend using Stripe, but eventhough Stripe supports iDEAL, the way it is integrated into Tendenci makes that the whole only works with credit cards. Tendenci is based on Django(Python) and there is a Python API for Mollie, so in theory it should be possible to integrate Mollie/iDEAL into Tendenci. But this is potentially a lot of work..... Additionally a Dutch translation is currently missing. Testing demo is live at https://tendenci.roodjongeren.nl/

2. Admidio: This basically only does member management, and there are no payment options. It however might be usable if we can find other solutions for the missing functionality (i.e. shared file storage would be possible with Nextcloud/Owncloud). This is used by Kameraadschappij here: https://intern.kameraadschappij.nl

3. ERPNext: Suggested by @JordiVanOs . It appears to be aimed at webshops, but can possibly be used for our purposes too. We need a bit more info on this one though.

Something else....
Please document more options with pros and cons below so we can properly compare things in one place.

PR adding proper deprecation notice in the works.

CC'ing @pingiun @JordiVanOs @rrooij @Leont

[pingiun]

Let's keep this open for discussion

[Leont]

I know SP uses CiviCRM, and BIJ1 is currently also moving towards that. It's a fairly big system though, that can do anything but will require you to set it up the way you want it.

[Nowa-Ammerlaan]

I know SP uses CiviCRM, and BIJ1 is currently also moving towards that. It's a fairly big system though, that can do anything but will require you to set it up the way you want it.

This took way too long but demo is up at https://drupal.roodjongeren.nl/ (I can PM you the password if you want to take a look)

Documentation is incomplete (mostly on the Drupal side), and I don't like that it is based on symfony (again). Otherwise it looks nice and flexible. Aesthetically it is certainly better then Tendenci (but we can of course theme both).

Major problem is (again) iDEAL. There's a plugin for Stripe, but it is unclear if this will work with iDEAL as well (the description seems to suggest that it doesn't). Possibly there is a plugin for Mollie as well but I haven't been able to find it. To test the Stripe plugin we'll have to wipe the demo and start again with an older version of CiviCRM because the plugin does not support the latest version.

Another problem is that Drupal 9 reaches end of life in November and CiviCRM is not yet compatible with Drupal 10. We could avoid this problem by using Wordpress as the CMS instead.

@Leont do you know how SP or BIJ1 implements iDEAL? Stripe, Mollie, something else entirely?

Maybe I'll try to set-up a Wordpress based demo as well, with an older version so we can check out this stripe plugin.

[KiaraGrouwstra]

@AndrewAmmerlaan BIJ1 uses Mollie

[Nowa-Ammerlaan]

Maybe I'll try to set-up a Wordpress based demo as well, with an older version so we can check out this stripe plugin.

And the wordpress based demo is live at https://wordpress.roodjongeren.nl/ (this was a lot easier then Drupal)

Turns out the Stripe plugin works with the latest version as well, despite it not being advertised as such (or at least I did not encounter any problems)

Still haven't found a Mollie plugin, but the Stripe one works rather well apart from it not working with iDEAL (as I feared). It does however support SEPA which might be good enough since we don't really need the speed of iDEAL. Using SEPA does require that someone identifies us with ID to Stripe.

@rrooij Could you elaborate what exactly it is that you don't like about CiviCRM? So far it works rather smooth (except for the Drupal business). and it seems to do everything we want it to do (periodic contribution payments, petitions, fund raising, polling, news letters). Haven't found a solution for file storage but for this we can use Nextcloud/Owncloud.

[KiaraGrouwstra]

specifically BIJ1 now uses WordPress plugin Pronamic Pay to handle Mollie/iDeal.
when we got civi down we'd like to use civi extensions with SEPA over doing Mollie tho for new members.
for files what we'd like to do is glue up our applications (like nextcloud) to civi thru LDAP by an OIDC-based SSO (maybe Keycloak maybe something else).
we're not about to get this done overnight tho, so for file sharing, mailings could function as a temp solution for current stuff.

[Nowa-Ammerlaan]

See also: https://github.com/roodjong/symfexit (MijnROOD but in Python/Django ❤️ )