More flexible groups/bundles. Need to be able to create groups of members with different membership levels and have an administrator for that group (read only or edit selectable) who is not responsible for financial transactions.

Parent Booster USA currently has four membership levels germane to this discussion:

Basic -- $195 to join, $95 to renew
Get Legal -- $295 to join, $95 to renew
Get Legal, Stay Legal -- $495 to join $395 to renew
School Administrator -- Free, but with limited benefits

I need to be able to set up groups of members containing members at each membership level. Typically there's a school administrator member who doesn't pay for renewal of the other members, but will make sure they do renew. The school administrators typically log on once a year to see who's paid. They absolutely don't want/won't do administrator functions.

Bundles require separate membership levels that aren't meaningful to us. Groups let me keep track of collections of members, but I can't pass that authority on to the school administrator member.

When people hit the "unsubscribe" link at the bottom of an email, it would be good, as a checkbox option on the page they land on, to allow them to unsubscribe from all emails, not just newsletters. I suspect some of our contacts will not be happy if they still receive event notifications when they intended to unsubscribe fully. I don't think that one should ask them to login to do this (from their full profile). At present, we will need to manually check for these people and remove them from other mailings.

PS. It would also be good if the slightly confusing terminology relating to email subscription was made consistent across the system (WildApricot has indicated that they intend fixing this aspect).

I would like to be able to pull individual data fields from the contact database and insert them dynamically within my content. This would, I feel, make pages more dynamic, reduce my workload, allow a high level of personaliation of member content and, I feel, enable member websites to become a little more sticky, creative and innovative. What do you think?

For example, I'd like to personalise content for each chapter/member but the content would be the same for each chapter/member. With the current system every time I create a new piece of content I then have to dupliate that piece of content for each additional chapter/member. Hence, the ability to pull a field (e.g. Chapter Name | Member Name) from the database would, I feel, allow me to create better websites that could be potentially more sticky to members.

It wouldn't stop at chapter/member names, I could use this for a myriad of stuff including personalising member content, creating dynamic content by getting clever with the contact database; I feel it would open up lots of new opportunities.

In the past I've used some sort of ODBC call on asp pages to access the database. Would the development of an API to achieve the above be useful to anybody else?

I'd really like to hear everybody's thoughts and ideas.

Kind regards
Steve

We would find "multiple choice with extra cost" much more useful if it had a few more features. We find we always need capacity and the ability to close a multiple choice option without deleting it. We hold an annual conference with many extra choices for social events and luncheons at extra costs. We run into WA problems for example when In the last days leading up to the event, we have to close some of the multiple choice items(caterer needs last head count), but we can still take general event registrations. Or, we may have an offsite tour and need to cap it to a bus capacity.

I know we could set up multiple events to do this, but our experience with our constituency is that it would be way too confusing.

Also we get registrants that want to come back in later and modify their multiple choice with extra cost, but that does not seem possible online.

so our wishlist:

1) Multiple choice w/extra cost that can be closed (not deleted).

2) Multiple choice w/extra cost that can have capacities. Auto-closes when capacity reached.

3) Multiple choice w/extra cost that can be modified by the attendee

Or the ability to nest events within a master event that all reports up and out at the master event level.

We allow our members to upload photos into a photo album shown with their Profile. Our level allows each image to be up to 25MB and that is way too big for viewing satisfactorily and will also use up our maximum allowed MB in no time. We also have no way to limit the number of images in an album. The automatic features of limiting how many albums there are is nice as is the automatic thumbnail feature with a click to show the full image. However, we really need to be able to control the number and size of each image uploaded. Please consider adding this.

Site admin for http://www.papnm.org

In our 4.3 release back on Dec 14, 2011 we have changed payment workflow - it now always goes through the following steps:start the transaction (e.g. event registration), fill out appropriate fields, confirmhave the invoice generated and displayed on a special page which lists full history of invoices and payments, highlighting open invoicespay for this invoice right away - or proceed to another transactionBefore 4.3 release, people had no ability to see invoices, only administrators was able to do it.

New workflow resolves many frequent requests we had, including: People can pay for several invoices with a single paymentThey can always retry later if their original attempt at online payment failed Administrators can manually create invoices, email them and have them paid onlineOverpayments and credits some members might have on their accounts can now be applied to future payments. Visitors can apply for membership, then register for an event and pay for both. (When a visitor starts event registration and there are member-only registration types, system suggests to apply for membership and after application shows him a button to continue event registration.)Member can see his payments and invoices history, including registration details without having to contact administratorsAll contacts, not only members can log in, view invoices and pay online We have now received a number of requests from people who want to completely disable these new capabilities and not show invoices and payments to their members/contacts. We have started our conversation about possible solution options here - http://forums.wildapricot.com/forums/308920-archive/suggestions/8835424-dealing-with-messy-financial-history-shown-to-cont - but soon realized that we need to address a basic question first:
Why do you need to disable this new functionality? What are your internal processes and how does this functionality interferes with them? Until we have a clear understanding of this, we can’t design a proper solution (e.g. simply ‘disabling everything’ would break all self-service transactions workflows). Here are some questions we would like to understand in regard to these requests:Do you accept only offline payments, only online payments or both? How do you keep track of unpaid invoices? (Especially, If you don’t do it in Wild Apricot) How are your internal workflows structured? (E.g. what people should do after entering a transaction in your Wild Apricot site, who/how/when enters payments and communicates with people who sent them) Do you use different payment methods for your membership and event registrations? (For example, you accept checks for membership but for event registrations you only take online payments.)What is your ideal picture of payment workflow in Wild Apricot? Please tell as as much as you can about your organization setup - this will help us to figure out the best solution.

In developing a membership registration form for our website, I am looking to include a "Date of Birth" field. However, the "Date" field type appears to only allow one method of entering a date. In our organization, there are many members who are older, and for whom the date entry requires navigation to their respective year of birth, which presents difficulty due to the method of data entry, and the propensity of our older members to be uncomfortable using computers.

(Admittedly, the calendar default of starting on today's date does lend itself to certain types of fields, like booking hotels or flights.)

It would be more intuitive and easier to use a method of entering data into the date field using three drop-down menus, like "Month", "Day", and "Year." I suppose I could do that myself by creating those 3 fields, but that opens up entry errors, like somebody entering "February 30" as a date, for example.

I recommend that the Wild Apricot team considers implementing an option such as the one I have suggested; it seems to be the more common method of entering dates into electronic forms, and would ease the burden on less-experienced users to navigate an unfamiliar date selection format.

I would love to hear what other users have experienced when utilizing the "Date" field in forms, if they have had difficulty, and what they have done to address user feedback in using it.

This may be specific to auth.net which we use. If one wishes to start recurring payments the apricot/auth.net process requires the initial payment to be made at the time the recurring payments are launched. We have run across multiple instances where we wish to start recurring payments at some point in the future but not credit the member's cards now. For instance we just had a case where someone had recently paid to join via check but for future payments wished to pay by credit card; Our alternatives are for the member or ourselves to remember to set up recurring payments at the renewal date (which means either we or the member need to remember and if we do it then we have to hold onto their credit card info - a potential security breach waiting to happen) or to launch the recurring payment process now and then refund or cancel the now duplicated payment. Neither present option makes much sense.

I am hoping that someone will be able to tell me how to do this, perhaps a workaround I haven't thought of?

We are trying to use WA for our conference registration and are having issues because we include hotel stays with our conference fees. Basically, we register attendees by group so they are either ALL members or ALL non-members. Great because the primary contact can register all of their board members/staff at one time and the system knows that they are members so their pricing will be correct. For each guest, their fee goes up $250 and for each room they reserve, it goes up $600. I also need to know WHICH room they are in (to put people together in rooms) so for example, Room 1, Room 2, Room 3. And I need to know if they have any special diet requirements, vegetarian, gluten-free, etc.

I'd appreciate any thoughts on the best way to do this. I could have each guest fill out all the information, but I don't want them to get charged for too many rooms. I'd like the primary registrant to choose the number of rooms and then have them note rooming info, diets, etc, on each guest's registration.