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Joining of 2 sites?

Forums: Suggestions and Feedback
Created on: 09/05/12 11:21 AM Views: 1588 Replies: 5
Wednesday, September 5, 2012 at 11:21 AM

We have an extensive Wilde Lake Alumni site (www.wildelakealumni.com) and when I first started using Class Creator, I got a friend in the class behind me to make a site (www.wildelake99.com). She's now interested in integrating her class site into ours, since she already has classmate's profiles there. How difficult would that be? I was thinking it might just be a database change to point to a new core site, but perhaps it's more involved than that? Anyway, I thought I'd ask!

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Wednesday, September 5, 2012 at 1:17 PM - Response #1

There is no mechanism in our system to graft two sites together. You'd have to download the data from one site and upload it as an addition to the class list on the other site. Profile comments would not transfer over, yearbook photos would have to be re-uploaded individually, and personal profile info for each classmate would have to be re-entered.


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Wednesday, September 5, 2012 at 1:27 PM - Response #2

Could this be placed on the todo list? In the past I've done some pretty extensive database work and I know that combining two databases from the administration end is really not a big task, particularly two databases that have the same schema. This is important for you in the future, because I'm sure you're going to get more schools who want to create an all-school site and want to easily integrate several into one (actually going the other way is also a good thing, so that an individual group from a particular class or group of classes could have their limited by class year view of the larger database). Apparently this is not one database with, for example, tables for each site? Even with multiple databases this should not be a huge problem and would certain make others such as the original author along with me much happier.
I apologize for suggesting to you how to do your job, but really, to have users do what you suggest and even lose information because the burden is on them and not on software that should make things like this easier, to me doesn't make a lot of sense - I hope this doesn't get me censored from your site.

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Wednesday, September 5, 2012 at 1:44 PM - Response #3

There is not a strong business case for making this change. If people want to create separate sites, then it doesn't really help us continue to be able to offer the service we do if we put development resources into making it easier for customers to pay us less for the same services, especially in a case like this where the need is pretty rare (at least in terms of actual requests). Our systems already do quite a bit which facilitates the movement of key data, but we simply can't afford to prioritize projects like this over improving more critical elements of our service.


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Thursday, September 6, 2012 at 10:10 AM - Response #4

I'm amazed at what you say. It sounds like your business plan is all about making it difficult for customers if you can't figure out a way to monetize a feature - that's too bad for your future business, INHO. A forward business plan would figure out how to take what some customers are asking for, implement those things, monetize it and then market it.

I'll quit haranguing you. We'll be looking for another site to host a multi-year alumni association. At this point your software appears too limited and your future directions don't seem to mesh with ours. This is too bad - there are many nice things about your system. Who knows - maybe we won't find another and try to stick with you???

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Thursday, September 6, 2012 at 10:44 AM - Response #5

Sorry you feel that way. We do what we do because there are people who want the service we provide. If we can't afford to make the service do *everything* people want it to do because the development effort ultimately reduces the revenue potential for our system (within the current range of constraints), then that is just the reality we all face. Frankly, you're getting a far more honest and straightforward response about this from me than you would get from any major software producer, and you are demonstrating why most won't bother with an honest answer.


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