Membership Lists
GXSA Operate 3 related, and partially discrete membership lists
1) The official membership list is managed in Excel
2) The Joomla website membership list; people with access to the members area on the GXSA website
3) The email distribution list
New Members
The normal process for new joiners is simple, but frequently forgotten/broken/circumvented
- 1) New user completes paperwork
- 2) Committee Member adds user to the Jooma website
- 3) Joomla automatically adds the user to the correct email distribution group (this does NOT need the Committee Member to do anything)
Effectively, the Committee Member only needs to add the new member to Excel, and to Joomla – everything else is automatic
However, sometimes we forget this and do things in the wrong order, or forget a step, or simply don’t know how to do it, so it’s forgotten, and the lists get de-synchronised.
Reconciling the lists
There is an annual task to reconcile the membership lists, usually in January as the membership base is stable at that point.
The steps are relatively easy, but require a little confidence, and expertise with the Excel. Fortunately, there is very little that can go wrong. In the following steps, we assume that the Excel database is the correct master (i.e. Single Source of Truth)
1) Open the master Excel database
2) On the first tab/worksheet (Primary Database) Copy all the cells
3) Open a new spreadsheet (you know have two spreadsheets open)
4) Copy all the contents from the Primary Database to your new spreadsheet
5) Close the master Excel spreadsheet, without saving it
6) you should now have just one spreadsheet open, with a single worksheet in it
7) Create a new worksheet in the spreadsheet
8) Copy the following cells to the new worksheet
9) Append the following cells to the new worksheet, so that you have one member per row
10) Sort the worksheet on email address (we MUST have an email address for Joomla, so without an email address people cannot have Joomla logins)
11) Delete the rows that don’t have an email address
Login to Joomla as an Administrator
Navigate to the User –> Manage list
On the toolbar, select to View “ALL” members
Click top-level checkbox, to select all the members
Click the “Export” button, so save the contents as an “XML” file – Joomla will save the file in your Downloads folder
Start Excel
Click “Open –> Browse”
Choose to view ALL Excel File Types (which will include “XML” files). You should now see the file that you just downloaded
Open the file that you downloaded
Excel will show a menu of methods to open the file – click “Read-Only Workbook” – Excel will open the XML file into columns
Click the column that is titled “/user/email”
On the Excel Ribbon click data –> Remove Duplicates. When prompted, select Expand teh Selection, then Continue
Missing steps here –