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Dave Miller edited this page Dec 19, 2021 · 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/oabsa/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 OA Tools > Dues Lookup Settings to find the settings for it. You can upload the file exported from OALM at OA Tools > Import Dues.

You can put the dues lookup widget on any page by using the [oadueslookup] shortcode.

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

There are pre-installed "fake ID numbers" that can be used as test codes to test the various situations. You can use Nataepu Shohpe's installation to try them out to see what the responses look like. Someday (hopefully soon) the output will be more customizable.

test code ID on file dues paid BSA audit result
123452 No n/a n/a
123453 Yes No No Match Found
123454 Yes Yes Not Registered
123455 Yes Yes Registered
123456 Yes No Registered
123457 Yes Yes No Match Found
123458 Yes No Not Registered
123459 Yes Yes never run

OALM Setup/Export/Import Instructions