Large associations often use commercial software to manage membership data. Smaller associations with more limited budgets sometimes face the difficult choice of spending money on an expensive commercial alternative or spending time and energy on rolling their own membership management solution. An open source tool called Admidio offers a better option. Admidio is a free user management tool for websites and organizations, and it even comes with modules for supporting member lists, managing events, building a guestbook or photo album, and creating a user-friendly download area.

Setting Up

Admidio is a classic web application that requires at least PHP 5.3.7 and MySQL 5.0 or PostgreSQL 9.0 for the server. The installation is similar to other Linux tools: First, download the latest version from the developer's homepage [1] and unzip the archive on your computer. Remove the components related to the software version from the folder name. Then, move the folder to a web server using an FTP program.

You should assign the 777 rights for the adm_my_files directory on the server, because the server needs to write some files there. The software creates the configuration file during installation. You can perform the initial configuration via the http://<Server>/admidio/index.php page in the browser. This page lets you specify data about the server on which the software is running (Figure 1), along with details on the association and the administrator.

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