Tendenci – The Open Source AMS joins new Stripe Partner Program to bring more commerce online and increase the GDP of the Internet

Tendenci – The Open Source AMS,​ an international Open Source provider of Association Management Software‘ to global organizations (languages),​ today announced that it has joined the Stripe Partner Program as a Verified AMS Open Source Stripe Payment Partner. With only 3% of GDP online, Stripe’s goal of the program is to increase internet commerce by helping NGOs and companies start, run, and scale their businesses.

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“We’re thrilled to be one of the first to join Stripe’s Partner Program,” said ​Ed Schipul, Founder and CEO a​t Tendenci​ – The Open Source AMS.

The NYSSPE Westchester / Putnam Chapter Unveils Brand New Tendenci Site to Connect Local Engineering Community

Houston, TX — 

The New York State Society of Professional Engineers, Inc. Westchester/Putnam Chapter supports their State (NYSSPE) and National (NSPE) Associations in protecting and promoting professional engineers in all disciplines and areas of practice, with a focus on the local needs of Westchester and Putnam County Professional Engineers.

The Westchester / Putnam Chapter chose Tendenci – The Open Source AMS to help connect local engineers through their events, as well as to provide current and prospective engineers with a wealth of knowledge and resources needed to further their training and education. The engineering association’s new Tendenci website was updated with a fresh contemporary layout to complement their messaging and to provide an engaging mobile-responsive interface to their users in the local engineering community.

NYSSPE-WPC’s new website utilizes many of Tendenci’s CMS features, including an array of Event Types from networking to professional development, to reach their constituents. Their new Customized Forms allow members to apply for sponsorship opportunitiesnominate exemplary engineers for awards, and even apply for scholarships!

In addition, the chapter is able to showcase their corporate sponsors in the Directories Module, as well as incorporating them into the homepage layout, as a way to give thanks for supporting the engineering community.

Tendenci – The Open Source AMS is proud to partner with NYSSPE-WPC on their mission to promote and defend the lawful and ethical practice of engineering, enhance the professional development of local engineers and future engineers, and to preserve and sustain the future of local engineering practices.

We look forward to seeing their positive effects on the local Westchester Putnam County engineering community!

Visit the Westchester Putnam Chapter of the New York State Society of Professional Engineers’ Site 

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

What a DDoS attack to an Association Looks Like

The following graphs show what a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on an association looks like. The names, rates and volume of the association have been blurred for security reasons. We are thankful to AWS for their own defenses in front of ours, which  help us mitigate these issues.

responding to ddos attacks as best we can
active response to mitigate attacks

Note: The  graphic above, is filtered for a 24 hour span for one client. The infrastructure is in place, and highly redundant, so we can monitor and keep our clients safe. For clients in the US or hosted in other countries (we have multiple Tendenci clouds as needed.)

Note 2: Make no mistake – If a bad-actor has the budget – they can and will purchase enough bots to take a site down. This is well documented. Even our resources at AWS are limited in what they can handle. Budget (yes BUDGET) accordingly. 

DNS Cobwebs – Tendenci.com and Schipul.com

DNS updates ahoy! If you see something unusual visit https://helpdesk.tendenci.com and submit a ticket or post on the forum. We love our clients. And we’ve been in business since 1997. For the backbone-crew of the company, you know, we’ve got a couple of years on us, and forgive us if we don’t remember every DNS entry for the last 17 years.

I am working to clean up years of cruft between the schipul and the tendenci aliases across all of our sites. It took me a while to figure out that the majority of sub-domain entries (like the “www” part of your domain) had long since been moved to production sites. So, forgive me, but I kinda went nuclear and just cleared out three or four hundred sets of entries from ten years ago.

HOWEVER, it is possible that you may have had a graphic or image using one of these old subdomains from 2005. Keep an eye out for that.

If this should cause a problem with your site it’s a great opportunity to clean things up. Which is why I did it on a Saturday night so it will replicate by Sunday and I’ll personally be monitoring the queue over the weekend (this is Ed typing.)

These changes literally go back to 2005 so my bet is nobody on your team will remember. But they CAN fix it with the template editor by fixing any old out of date links. You’ll score better in search engines as an added bonus and you don’t even need any help from us.

Or if you have the budget to prepay for mods, we can help. Of course we’d rather focus on building out the Tendenci platform. For free assistance visit https://community.tendenci.com but otherwise billable.

I thought I should give y’all a heads up about us clearing out the cobwebs from Halloween and encourage you to keep an eye out for anything that looks different. If you see it, please fix it. We can help, but that is billable obviously ( I wish my employees worked for free but they currently don’t. Nor do they donate money to the company. It’s a conundrum.)

Tendenci, the NPO CMS website software, is going open source thanks to Matt and Dries

UPDATE 4/3/2012: The Tendenci Open Source Download is available on GitHub here. Also view Instructions on Hosting Requirements

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We are making Tendenci open source. Yes really. Official Tendenci Open Source Press Release here. So what is Tendenci?

Tendenci is an Open Source Software for Associations (AMS) and Built Specifically for Non-Profits.

That’s it. Sounds simple but organizing people, especially members of non-profit organizations (NPOs), is a real challenge. And designing software is a challenge too. Therefore focus produces better results.

We’ve talked about making our product open source for years internally. So why now?

The tipping point for me was last year at our bi-annual conference where we had the privilege of hosting two open-source visionaries Dries Buytaert and Matt Mullenweg on the stage at the same time. Dries is the founder of Drupal and Matt is the founder of WordPress.

Their WordPress-Drupal talk at SchipulCon 2011 moderated by David was absolutely inspiring to me. Here were two men who give their product away for FREE but still create jobs with over 100 employees each. The video is on WordPress.tv here.

One thing Matt said during the talk was:

People being told what to do and working for money are never going to match people working for passion and a community.

— MATT MULLENWEG

Matt’s right. I do things for free with a greater passion than what I do for the almighty dollar. I’ll spend 5 hours editing photos for a volunteer event out of passion for the arts. Or to support and remember our troops. Because I am passionate about both. I am passionate about non-profits and service to community and country, which is what drove me to start programming Tendenci in 2001! And yet paradoxically I have always kept Tendenci proprietary. My vision for the company is:

To Connect and Organize the World’s People. Do Good.

Thus we are making our code open source for the NPO community to use, build upon, download and do as they wish. And yes, we fully realize our competitors will be the first to download. But hey, maybe they have some great ideas for integration plugins and they can make a profit too. It will be released on GitHub to coincide with the NTEN conference in San Francisco next month.

Why am I doing this? It is me (Ed) making an ideological decision. I didn’t say “logical” I said “ideological.” I want to change the world. After travelling extensively and earning a degree in Political Science I’ve become more aware that we are part of a global community. I want to leave the world a better place than when I arrived. Yes, seriously!

Open Source enables us to DO GOOD at a higher level than our pure proprietary model allows. “To connect and organize the worlds’ people. Do good.” As goes the vision so goes the company. Enzo the (talking) dog in the amazing book The Art of Racing in the Rain says:

That which you manifest becomes you.

What Enzo was saying is that when you are driving a race car you can’t look at the wall to stay away from it. You need to look at the road way up ahead so you are prepared BEFORE you get there. And proprietary is limited by resources in ways that open source is not. We can manifest more good being open source.

Matt and Dries convinced me that we can build an open source product through a global community to change the world, AND still create jobs and make a profit. Thus after 14 years in business and having started programming Tendenci in 2001 (11 years!) I am ready to make the jump to open source.

What technology is behind it? It was originally written in ASP. Not anymore. On January 22nd 2009 our programming team convinced me we needed a complete rewrite because the only people who know the Tendenci 4 framework are people who work at Schipul because I never documented it. Ooops. So over the last three years we have done a COMPLETE rewrite of Tendenci from the ground up using the best-of-breed open source technology. At a technical level our programming team recommended the Django/Python/mySQL/Ubuntu “stack.”

That was a big decision. I’m committed and I am 100% positive this is the right path forward for us, our clients and NPOs everywhere. (We plan to have a github repository available by NTEN if not sooner. See you in San Francisco y’all!)

Thanks,

Ed

QUESTIONS?  (POST IN COMMENTS WITH MORE QUESTIONS)

Is Tendenci really built specifically for non-profits and will memberships be included in the open source download?

Yes and yes. Memberships are included in the base download. As are membership benefits like pricing for events etc.

Can businesses still use Tendenci?

Yes, most definitely. In fact with the new plug-in architecture and the new templating system, you will have even greater flexibility.

For example, WordPress is used as a great CMS system and we build a BUNCH of WP sites for businesses, organizations, individuals, artists, and non-profit organizations. WordPress rocks. It has a ton of great add-ons. Yet its DNA is fundamentally a blogging platform. Tendenci is fundamentally a CMS for non-profits.

Will Schipul, the company behind Tendenci, continue to build and support Tendenci?

Yes. Absolutely. I LOVE THIS SOFTWARE! And our programming team is excited to be a part of the open source community. We are not going anywhere. Quite the opposite – we are getting even more energized about it!

While I like being able to download it if I want, I’d rather not deal with all of that. Does Tendenci offer hosting?

Absolutely. Visit www.tendenci.com and click the “Free Trial” button and you are up and running. Work with your own developer to configure it to your specifications or call us at 281 497 6567 and we can help.

We are a web design firm. Can we sell Tendenci sites and host them on our own servers?

Yes. That is how open source works. And we need design partners as well to help with clients who choose to host with us. And theme and plug in-developers too.  You can find out more by checking out our Partner Programs.

How will you stay in business if you just give away your product?

I not only expect to “stay in business” but I expect our profit and revenue to go up through lower cost cloud based hosting at Amazon and increased volume. Lower costs means higher usage pretty much in every economic model I have ever seen.

And Tendenci being open source creates an ecosystem for other developers to develop apps on that meet the needs of their specific clients.

Why make Tendenci Open Source now, in 2012? Why the timing?

What better time? Thanks to our clients we grew another 20% in revenue and earned a fair profit last year. We have been profitable since 2002 and are completely self funded so I didn’t have to call a banker or a board that doesn’t understand SaaS and open source to get approval to make this decision. I simply listened to our clients. I listened to our employees. I listened to our stakeholders. I listened to Matt and Dries. And I made a decision that is best for everyone including non-profits all over the world given Django is multi-language.

And hey, financially we are strong and what better time to give to the open source community than during a recession and at a time of strength? I would have done this years ago but you can’t build an open source community around a proprietary technology like ASP (what I originally wrote it in). It was the rewrite of Tendenci by our young and talented programming team that is allowing us to make the move now.

Why is open source so important for NPOs? Do they really care?

Yes, yes and more yes. Just ask them.

According to the NTEN 2011 survey 33% custom built their web sites (perhaps on top of open source), 10% used proprietary products, cloud based or not. The remaining 57% strictly use open source software. Excluding non-profit hospitals and other niche verticals, I believe open source web technology probably accounts for close to 70% of the market by number of NPOs. PHP based CMS systems like Drupal, WordPress and Joomla currently fill this need, and they are great products.

I believe opening Tendenci up as open source provides a fourth viable option to meet the specific needs of non-profit web sites. And Tendenci is built in the Python programming language on the Django framework which opens opportunities up to developers who prefer Python.

Or to put it another way, I believe proprietary SaaS products that target the non-profit community will only survive if they focus on very specific niches because they are excluding almost 60% of their target audience. As a VC would say, that sort of limits your “addressable market.” Our proprietary competitors don’t share this belief. And I didn’t either last year. I’m a convert. And I ask you,

Would YOU rather know you can download all of the technology for your site if you wanted to?

Of course your answer is yes. You want open source because you want and deserve to control the destiny of your web presence.

That is why my personal blog and this blog are on WORDPRESS! I believe WordPress is the best blogging platform around. I love it. I started with a paid hosted site at www.wordpress.com. And at some point I wanted more control so I migrated to my own server (we have a few. #heh). Shouldn’t you have that same freedom as a non-profit?

Well, now you do.

How can I get a copy of the source code and start working on it now? (I’m writing this on 3/15/12 – the Ides of March indeed)

We hope to have a public repository available on github by NTEN next month. The (slight) delay is simply because we built our hosted environment to use three distinct servers, search index, web server and CDN. That won’t make sense to 99% of the people reading this. In English it means “we built it for BIG HUGE SITES. We need to make that part optional so a small NPO can download and run it on their own web server without having to buy three slices at Amazon. We’re working on it! And I can’t wait!

In the meantime, you can sign-up on our website and we’ll be sending an email with the download link to you as soon as it is ready.

(Note: We do have a few select beta testers with early access working on the SpacePoints site. We’ll get it available to everyone soon.)

What other questions do you have? Hit us up in the comments below!

#peace

https://www.tendenci.com/help-files/topic/94/