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Dave Miller edited this page Jun 12, 2014 · 24 revisions

About OA Dues Lookup

Welcome!

OA Dues Lookup is a Wordpress plugin to allow your Order of the Arrow lodge members look up whether their dues are paid or not. It currently works in conjunction with data exported from OA LodgeMaster, however, if you have some other system that can export data in a machine-readable way (Excel spreadsheet, CSV, etc), file an issue requesting it and I'll try to make it work.

Download and Installation

You can download the plugin from https://github.com/oa-bsa/dues-lookup/releases/latest

To install it: in the Wordpress admin, go to Plugins > Add New > Upload, and give it the zip file. Click "Activate Plugin" after it finishes installing. Then go to Settings > OA Dues Lookup to find the settings for it. This is also where you upload the file exported from OALM.

It defaults to using /oadueslookup as the URL. Feel free to make it something simple like /dues or whatever else suits you.

Versions prior to 1.0.3 did not check for updates. If you have version 1.0.2 or older installed, you will need to deactivate and delete the existing version before installing version 1.0.3 or newer. It will keep your config, don't worry. As of version 1.0.3, future versions should show up in Wordpress's Plugin Updates panel when they are available.

Design Goals

My design goals in creating this (mostly to deal with privacy concerns) were:

  1. To look up whether your dues are paid or not, you need to know your member ID. This is a piece of information that's generally not out there and won't really be of use to an identity thief anyway.
  2. Nobody can view the entire list. You can only look it up by member ID, one ID at a time.
  3. The result the member gets to look at doesn't include any names. It only has the date they last paid dues, and what year they're paid up through.
  4. If we don't have their BSA Member ID on file, they can't look up their dues. We're not allowed to renew their membership without it now anyway (at least in my council), so if we don't have it on file, they're not technically a member, even if they paid up. If someone tries to look up an ID that's not in the list, it will suggest how to submit their ID to us.

As you probably noticed because this is hosted on Github, the plugin is open source. If programming is your thing and you want to help maintain this, feel free to fork it and send me pull requests (or put a patch in a ticket). I'm also open to trying to make this work for people, so if you want it to do something it doesn't, feel free to file tickets in the issue tracker.

How to get help or report problems

Use the issue tracker. Or email me at the address in the screenshots below.

Screenshots

The main page looks like this:

Intro Screen

From there you can look up a member ID and hopefully get a result like this:

Paid Results Screen

Or maybe one like this:

Unpaid Results Screen

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