Committee Meeting 06-Dec-2025 Technology Report
Report on Technology for the Committee Meeting on 6th December 2025 by Kevin Machin
A summary of the progress made since the 30th October report, along with plans for the next steps.
Achievements
Quite a bit of behind-the-scenes work on the new website has been going on. In particular, the way documents are handled has been improved. This should make it easier in the future for use to make material available to read and download by our visitors.
As an example, you can read the latest Link edition here on the site.
Next Steps
New Website
The next goal is to have what I'm calling a minimum viable product. In other words, a site that's at least no worse that the current one, but probably won't be significantly better in terms of benefits and usability for our visitors. At least not straight away.
To get us to that stage, we'll need:
- [Done] to have the ability for visitors to download documents, e.g. membership application/renewal forms.
- To have a members-only area, accessible only by logging in with a password.
- To provide online forms for things like: subscriptions, competition entries, events booking.
Shop
I plan to continue researching into possible alternative ways to implement a shop. Early indications are:
- Fully implementing one ourselves, is likely to be a minefield of security and privacy related pitfalls. We should almost certainly not go down this route.
- There are many alternatives using third party handling. Some of these would host the whole thing, whereas some would involve us making a shop site but using external services for processing the payments. There would, of course, be a financial cost for this, but probably less than we're currently paying.
- Other than bank transfers and cheques, it seems unavoidable that we'll lose a percentage on every transaction. I don't see any viable nor realistic way around that.