Support » Plugin: Volunteer Sign Up Sheets » counting hours worked per volunteer
counting hours worked per volunteer
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Hi,
first of all thank you for this very intuitive plugin.
We are a small private school where all parents have to work a minimum of x hours per year.
Now my question. Would it be possible with this plugin to consider the hours worked for every volunteer and sum them also by exporting the data and summing it in an Excel sheet)?
Uobet
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Thanks for the comment… you’re welcome!
Unfortunately, what you want to do is not a current feature of the plugin.
Yes, it is possible, but that would require quite a bit of extra programming. It was not something our school needed when I created the plugin, so it was not something I considered. Maybe one or two other people have asked for this, so feel free to post it in the Feature Requests section on the forum of my site.
Note also that this plugin is free and open source, so any one with some PHP/MySQL skills is free to contribute and add the features that you want, as I am much too busy with projects where I can make some money and feed my family, so I make no promises as to when, or even if, I will work on any of the very many feature requests that I get. There are also plenty of programmers for hire, including myself, who could be hired to add features such as this.
Support donations and more reviews, or even some code contributions from other developers, would be good encouragement for further development. I keep up to date with bug fixes and compatibility issues, but have no current plans to add any new features.
Thank you for your answer.
I am sorry, but I am not a programmer and wouldn’t therefore be able to develop the features in question.
But I would be ready to support the development of this feature with – let’s say – 50 Euro. How many people doing the same would you need in order to cover the programming, maybe also considering the fact, that a plugin with more features should attract more potential plugin users and – hopefully – lead to more donations?
Best Regards
Uobet
No problems, I wasn’t suggesting that you develop the features yourself, but that the code is open source, so you could always “shop around” for programmers that might be able to help you out at a price you could afford. Or, perhaps you even have some friends who know how to program and might be willing to help you out.
Frankly, it doesn’t matter how popular a plugin gets on WordPress.org, it’s a “free mentality” of users here, and even the teams that make the most popular plugins have to rely on “pro” versions, “premium support”, or other methods of trying to make some money, since nobody will pay or donate for something they can get for free.
In accordance with the policies of WordPress.org, I can’t discuss my rates for custom development work, so you would have to contact me privately through my site for that. It would take quite a few donations of what you suggested, however, to pay for my time at my normal custom development rate.
I will continue to support this plugin as much as possible with bug fixes, and any needed updates as WordPress changes, and I’m happy for some of the paying work that this plugin has brought my way through clients that found me through this site. As I have slow periods between major development jobs, or when I’m not busy with my own premium WooCommerce extensions, I will sort through the huge amount of feature requests and pick something else to work on. I just don’t make any promises as to when, or even if, I will work on any more free features for these free plugins.
Also, just thought I would mention that you can already export the sign-up data for each sheet to a CSV file that you could then import into Excel and use that to do some calculations. Not sure if you were already aware of that.
If you make sure to always put a start and end time for each task, then you could use that to figure out how many hours each volunteer worked for each event/task.
I’m not much of an Excel user, but I know that you can do some pretty powerful calculations and scripts with it. So, you may be able to merge all the sheets together on a regular basis, and automatically sum up the hours for each volunteer with some Excel calculations from the exported fields. Might be quicker/easier than hiring someone to do a custom plugin/extension to keep track of things.
People who don’t program don’t understand everything that goes on behind the scenes in adding, what to them, seems like a simple feature.
For example, before a programmer could even begin to start writing code for the hour tracking feature you want, there are a lot more details and considerations that would need to be discussed. A few quick examples:
- Where are these hours saved? A new database table/field? User Meta field? Are we associating with user accounts, or also somehow keeping track of hours for people who don’t have a user account?
- How are the # of hours for each user for an event determined? Do users have to verify the actual # of hours they volunteered? Does someone else need to review/approve them?
- Who has access to view and/or edit the hours? Can users view and edit their own hours from the public side? Does admin or some other coordinator review and/or edit from admin dashboard? All those types of interfaces need to be programmed also
- Do we need to keep track of who hasn’t reached the minimum # of hours? Do we need notifications? Minimum # of hours over what time period? When do those hours get reset, and is it automatic or manual? Not every organization is going to have the same time period and # of required hours, or maybe not even any required # of hours at all.
Those are just a few of the many details that would need to be discussed before this could even be broken down into block diagrams and eventually functions and code.
None of this particularly difficult to do, but all the very specific details need to be worked out before, if it’s a custom solution. If it’s something that would be released to the whole community, then lots more work needs to be done to create variable settings for all these functions so that other users could configure it to fit their organization’s needs.
So, it’s very time consuming just to get it all spec’d out, and then to break it all down into small computer steps, do the actual programming, and test everything thoroughly along the way… not to mention all the unpaid hours in support once a plugin like this is released to the community.
Thank you very much for your hints and information.
Best Regards
Uobet
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