Help with membership system

Ladies & Gentlemen,

I’m a very experienced PHP developer, and I’ve recently (in the last month or so) begun to switch to MODx for much of my development. I absolutely love the features and direction of this project, plus the "roll your own" attitude it provides. It doesn’t make me feel like I’m supposed to fit my application around what’s provided in the API/framework as does Drupal, Joomla, etc.

My question:
I’m developing a site for a client who needs to keep track of their organization’s membership base. Now, we won’t be using the site to actually register users as that’s not really in the scope of this project. On the other hand, we would like to be able to have an application somewhere (either front end or back end) on the site which allows officers of the organization to add and track membership data, check if yearly dues have been paid, etc. In other words, a sort of online spreadsheet that they can use to make life easier for the "membership officer". Perhaps in the near future we’ll be adding in other functions as well.

What direction would you suggest that I take with this project? There are so many options that I’ve come across, and I feel like I need a different opinion from an outside source.

Any help is much appreciated! Thank you in advance.

jh

You’ll probably get a lot of different recommendations, and perhaps I’m biased (being the author of xPDO), but I’d recommend looking at xPDO for managing a set of custom data tables in MySQL for this data. You could develop a rich API for your application, present the data in tables, easily create forms for editing them, and eventually integrate this membership data with MODx user data. As MODx moves forward, the API will be moving to one that is xPDO-based itself, so it would not only provide a great way to quickly get started with managing the custom data via MODx snippets/plugins/modules, but would also give you a jump on understanding the upcoming 0.9.7 MODx API changes...

I know the download says it’s an alpha, but it’s fairly stable, we provide support for it here in the MODx forums, and it’s been adopted by several people that are using it within some critical production environments (including in some existing MODx sites). In fact, the xPDO web site itself is running on an alpha build of MODx 0.9.7, and thus on xPDO itself.