open source ams Archives - Tendenci - The Enterprise Open Source AMS Blog

2025-11-062025-11-06

NEW Major Release: Tendenci OSS v15.0

Major Release: Tendenci v15.0 — Open Source Association Management Software (AMS)
Released March 30, 2024. As of October 8, 2025, Tendenci is currently on version 15.3.7.

A Heartfelt Thank You 🩵🐾`
First and foremost, we want to thank the GitHub community and all the developers contributing to the Tendenci project—your Tendenci project! Together, we continue to empower nonprofits and associations worldwide with open source freedom and transparency.

If you host your Tendenci website with us—great news: your site has already been upgraded. Yeii! 🤓🐾

Real People, Real Work 👩🏻‍💻🐾
It took a lot of planning and teamwork to cross the finish line for this major upgrade, and it wasn’t performed with Artificial Intelligence. It was done by real people—in particular, a strong programmer and developer who has passionately maintained the Tendenci repository for more than 15 years. Our team proudly celebrates our Chief Programmer, Jenny Qian, who continues to be a pillar of the Tendenci community.

Our Commitment to You 🐾
As always, we remain dedicated to providing our hosted clients with secure, scalable, and affordable managed hosting services in our AWS private cloud. Compared to other AMS platforms, our hosting stands out—
✅Security and privacy first

✅No per user or admin fees
✅No license fees
✅ Upgrades are included in the hosting plan that best suits your association

If your association is exploring a new Association Management System (AMS), we’d love to connect. Contact us for a free consultation and demo!

What’s New in Tendenci OSS v15.0?! 🙌

You can find the full list of software release and upgrade details in our CHANGELOG.md file.

Major Highlights ✨
🤓 Dropped support for Django 3.2 LTS — Tendenci now requires Django 4.2 LTS.
🤓 Database updates — Minimum supported version raised: PostgreSQL 12+ required.
🤓 Base template upgrade — Tendenci now uses Font Awesome v6 by default (older Font-Awesome links should be updated).
🤓 URL configuration changes — Outdated url() imports replaced with re_path() in urls.py, in line with Django 4.x best practices.

For step-by-step upgrade instructions from v14.x to v15.0, visit our documentation on Read the Docs.

More in v15.x ✨

Tendenci v15.x is packed with exciting new features and enhancements—from the Newsletter module to Payments and Donations, Membership and Event Management updates, Directories module updates, and more!

Check out our recent version blog post for details:
🤩 Version bump 15.3 and 15.3.1
🤩 Version bump 15.3.4
🤩 Version bump 15.3.5

Remember to upgrade your Tendenci site to the latest version. Post your issues on GitHub for full support!

TendenciDEV Team

2020-01-052020-01-06

Data Lakes for Smarter Associations

Open Source is Winning the Internet. Join us to be the BEST regardless of culture or country.

What is a “data lake”?

Data lake – it’s a big, partially structured and differently structured set of data from your association that you can use to answer interesting questions. Think of it like throwing everything in your pantry into one magical cauldron and it comes back with answers. Of course be careful what you ask, as SECURITY IS ALWAYS JOB 1! But it’s cool.

This is how AWS visualizes it:

Source: https://aws.amazon.com/big-data/datalakes-and-analytics/what-is-a-data-lake/

Having been personally involved in politics, analytics, electrical engineering, programming, robotics, public relations and media strategy not to mention the whole entrepreneurship thing, I must to start with a warning; do NOT go overboard.

Luckily Tendenci as your AMS makes this a whole lot easier with all of the ways to import and export data (or your whole database.) And pretty much every report has a structured export as well, from custom forms, donations, event registrations, memberships, you name it. You have FULL ACCESS to YOUR DATA in both flat files and in the actual database schema. For example:

I like this quote from wipro:

If the data in a lake is not well curated, then it may turn into a data swamp, flooding an organization with information.
https://www.wipro.com/en-US/analytics/five-best-practices-to-keep-your-data-lake-healthy/

You can see more screen shots of the built in reporting within Tendenci. Yet let’s be realistic, you are integrating data from many sources and a Data Lake including but not limited to your data on Tendenci might be just the thing. Contact us for more, because we LOVE DATA!

And we’ve got over 20+ years of experience to back it up.

Why not make 2020 the banner year to grow your membership and donations? Because that’s what we THRIVE ON! YOUR SUCCESS!

2019-12-182019-12-19

A fond farewell from Rachel and a celebration of new beginnings

To our Tendenci clients, you are changing the world. It has been a privilege to be a leader for the company and the community, and I thank you all for the opportunity.

It is with mixed emotions that I say that last Friday December 6, 2019, was my last official day with Tendenci. I say “official” because you never really leave a community that you care deeply about. (And don’t worry, Ed is still guiding the ship with the help of a strong team.)

I have been an avid part of the growth of Tendenci from a small, proprietary software product launched almost twenty years ago into the global, multilingual, open source resource it is today. My enthusiasm for Tendenci is as strong now as ever. And I’m proud of what we have accomplished.

I have truly enjoyed working with so many great people over the years, both the amazing employees who feed my soul and the wealth of Tendenci users who keep me challenged. Software, like a garden, is never finished. It is designed, built, tended, and constantly improved. Keeping things fresh, adding new functionality, and building on the latest technology are the core of a thriving environment.

To everyone I have worked with, keep moving forward. I know there are great things ahead for you and all of the Tendenci community!

Feel free to connect with me (Rachel on linkedin) as I move forward knowing Tendenci is in good hands and our clients are safe and growing! I will still be in the background keeping Ed in line and celebrating the future successes of Tendenci and the community as they happen. Rock on y’all!

(Editor “Ed” notes: THANK YOU RACHEL FOR YOUR HUGE CONTRIBUTION TO OUR GLOBAL GROWTH!)

2019-07-162019-07-16

Tendenci AMS Gains Ground in Global Market Share

Tendenci – The Open Source AMS Gains Ground in Global Market Share

It is great to see an independent third party rank Association Management Software from a global perspective. As a part of the Tendenci AMS Community, we will let the summary from HTF on market growth and Tendenci’s Global Share speak for itself:

Source: https://www.htfmarketreport.com/reports/1722509-global-association-management-software-market-3

From the report:

HTF MI has added the report on Global Association Management Software Market for the forecast till 2025, the report comprises of the estimation of the Global Association Management Software Market. The following Industry is shown to progress with a noteworthy rise in the Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) during the forecast period owing to various factors driving the market. Some of the key players mentioned in this research are “Cvent Event Management, TOPS Professional, in1touch, Raklet, Book-It Membership Software, Tendenci, Personify360, Aptify, Dashboard & MASS”, etc.

And:

The scope of the report extends from market scenarios to comparative pricing between major players, cost and profit of the specified market regions. The numerical data is backed up by statistical tools such as SWOT analysis, Porter’s Five Analysis, PESTLE analysis and so on.

Company Profiles: Cvent Event Management, TOPS Professional, in1touch, Raklet, Book-It Membership Software, Tendenci, Personify360, Aptify, Dashboard & MASS
Global Association Management SoftwareMarket by Types: , On-Premise & Cloud-Based
Global Association Management SoftwareMarket by Applications: Small Business, Medium-sized Business & Large Business

Rapid Growth Factors in the Global AMS Software Market

In addition, the market is growing at a fast pace and the report shows us that there are a couple of key factors behind that. The most important factor that’s helping the market grow faster than usual is the tough competition.

Tendenci – The Open Source AMS continues to grow globally, we believe, because it is a community much more than anything else. All of the code is on github, documentation on readthedocs, and translation is crowd-sourced on Transifex. Self host or host with us, your choice, your data, your association.

THANK YOU to all of the developers out there who are contributing, translating, updating and maintaining a very complex piece of software. AMS software that is inclusive of other languages and cultures, and a team that believes in security and privacy.

OUR MISSION IS TO CONNECT AND ORGANIZE THE WORLD’S PEOPLE. DO GOOD.

2017-09-092025-12-28

The Incredible Growth of Python – StackOverflow

Python, the language used to program Tendenci – The Open Source AMS, continues it’s meteoric rise in the world of developers. And where the developers go is where the rest of us go. Thus Python’s rise matters. And it benefits every Tendenci user, self hosted or hosted with our small company (same software either way).

IEEE Spectrum rates the languages by its readers as follows:

Python has continued its upward trajectory from last year and jumped two places to the No. 1 slot, though the top four—Python, C, Java, and C++—all remain very close in popularity.

StackOverflow, a go-to site for pretty much every programmer and sysadmin out there, has a new blog post up on the incredible growth of the Python Programming Language. Python is of course the programming language used in Tendenci – The Open Source AMS. From the Stack Overflow post:

June 2017 was the first month that Python was the most visited tag on Stack Overflow within high-income nations. This included being the most visited tag within the US and the UK, and in the top 2 in almost all other high income nations (next to either Java or JavaScript). This is especially impressive because in 2012, it was less visited than any of the other 5 languages, and has grown by 2.5-fold in that time.

They have numerous charts to back up the data, but these two in particular paint a telling picture.

From Stack Overflow – the current tag questions viewed:

Perhaps even more impressive is the projection on the continued growth of Python. Just WOW!

The above graphs should give you confidence in your choice of using Tendenci as your AMS as the developers are not only there, but growing. Given Tendenci is fully open source (this is different from “free trial” AMS systems which are NOT actually FOSS (Free and Open Source Software). Wikipedia describes the difference as:

(FOSS means) anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source code is openly shared so that people are encouraged to voluntarily improve the design of the software.^[3] This is in contrast to proprietary software, where the software is under restrictive copyright and the source code is usually hidden from the users.

Many of our competitors who are NOT Open Source and not true FOSS which can sometimes confuse people. I’ll do a future post on examples of sometimes misleading representations by AMS systems that are not “actually” Free and Open Source (FOSS) as defined on Wikipedia.

The good news is with the growth of Python, it only make sense that developers will look at and many will join in to help the community improve the software as they join associations themselves.

We’ve written about why we chose Python over PHP to develop Tendenci open source several times. Correctly choosing the open source stack gives us, and everyone in the community, confidence to see the trends predicted correctly. It wasn’t rocket science – we just listened to our team, we listened to younger developers, and most importantly we listened to our clients on what the future was/is going to be.

And associations are kind of a big deal and they can’t use minimum viable products.

Why are associations unwilling to accept apps that meet only minimal requirements? Um… because they started as Guilds and go back to Medieval times. From Britannica on Guilds and Trade Associations:

Guild, also spelled gild , an association of craftsmen or merchants formed for mutual aid and protection and for the furtherance of their professional interests. Guilds flourished in Europe between the 11th and 16th centuries and formed an important part of the economic and social fabric in that era.

and Britannica goes on….

… associations are known to have existed in ancient Rome, however, where they were called collegia. These craft guilds seem to have emerged in the later years of the Roman Republic. They were sanctioned by the central government and were subject to the authority of the magistrates.

This is a huge topic of course. Just know that Tendenci is the ONLY top ranked AMS system that is truly FOSS. Unlimited admins, users, contacts – you can self host or if hosted with us we only charge for processing power. Got 1M users and contacts and 50 admins? No problem. And the growth of Python assures your continued freedom from vendor lock-in no matter what.

#peace and happy (Python) programming y’all!