AlumDeck

Documentation · guide 2 of 10

Making it yours

This is docs/02-customise.md, one of the ten guides that ship inside the AlumDeck zip under docs/, as written for release 2.0.0. The same guide opens inside the admin, from the ? link in a screen's header or from System, Help.

Everything a committee would want to change is a setting in the admin area. You should not need to edit a template, and if you find yourself wanting to, tell us - that is a gap in the product, not in you.

Sign in at yourdomain.com/admin, or at the admin address you chose under Settings > General > Admin address (the installer's last screen shows the exact link). Every admin screen has a ? link in its header that opens the matching part of these guides; System > Help lists them all.

Settings, in the order most people do them

All of these are under Settings in the admin menu, except Admin appearance (under System) and Giving page (under Money). Settings pages are for full administrators only.

PageWhat it controls
GeneralAssociation name, short name, tagline, description; your institution's name, address and founding year; membership numbers, levels and the fee note; country, dialling code, timezone and date format; contact details and social links; the admin address
WordingYour words for a year group (class, cohort, batch...), for a member and for the association - used on every page, email and admin screen
Logo & brandingLogo, square mark, favicon, header subtitle, the homepage photo, the History page picture, and whether visitors can install the site on a phone
Theme & coloursFour colours: primary, accent, dark surface, page background
Admin appearance (System)Which of the three admin layouts everyone gets by default
HomepageWhich blocks appear on the front page, and in what order
Member profilesDirectory filters, the skills, industries and "I can help with" lists, the membership card's QR code, the install prompt, mentoring check-ins and ratings
Events, jobs & volunteeringThank-you emails after events, how long job postings stay up and when posters are reminded, when volunteers get a shift reminder
CommunityDiscussion topics, the editing window, photos in posts, the guidelines page, words that hold a post for review, document categories
FooterWidget columns, copyright line, bottom note
EmailHow the site sends email (SMTP or the server's own mail), the sender, a test button, sending speed and the hourly limit, the deliverability check (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), open and click tracking, the word used when a name is unknown
Member emailsHow often members get news and community email by default (at once, weekly, monthly) and the weekly digest day
InvitationsThe invitation email's subject and text, reminder days, how long the link works, a test to yourself, and a count of who has signed in
SEOTitles, descriptions and share images per page, search-engine verification, analytics and tracking codes
Page copyThe small line above each heading, the heading and the introduction of every built-in page
Giving page (Money)Currency, receipts (and their wording), the financial year, number style, the causes you raise for, the donate button
Privacy & cookiesThe cookie banner, how quickly deletion requests must be answered, and how long old data is kept
Engagement & insightsHow the 0-100 engagement score is weighted, where the bands start, and when an event counts as having few replies
ModulesTurn whole features on or off
SecurityThe Cloudflare Turnstile keys (the human check on forms), the site's secure defaults at a glance, and Check my headers
Maintenance modeTake the site offline while you work on it
Automatic backupsNightly backups of the database and uploads, on or off, and the passphrase that encrypts them

System > Updates (not under Settings) shows your version, applies a new version's database updates, and can check for new versions.

General

Association name is used everywhere - page titles, emails, the browser tab, the phone home-screen name. Set it before you invite anyone.

The example content the installer can add dates its timeline from sixty years ago, because the installer does not ask when you were founded. Setting the founding year later does not move those entries: edit their years, or delete them, under History timeline.

Your own words

Settings > Wording renames the words the software uses: batch (one year group - class, year group, cohort...), member and association. Write each in lower case as it reads mid-sentence; it is capitalised at the start of a heading, and a blank plural is made from the singular (class becomes classes). Leave a box blank to keep the packaged word.

The words change everywhere a person reads them: public pages, the member area, emails, and the admin screens (menu entries, column headings, filters). Two things do not change, on purpose: web addresses (the member area's year-group room stays at /connect/batch), and text you or your members wrote yourselves, such as posts and pages.

Settings > Page copy lets you rewrite the small line above the heading (eyebrow), the heading and the introduction of every built-in page - the home page, About, Events, Join, Contact, the member home, the directory, the job board and the rest. Blank keeps the packaged text. On the member home you can use {first_name} in the heading; on a year-group room, {year}.

Logo & branding

Three separate images, because they are three different jobs:

  • Logo - wide, for the header. Set the display height to match your artwork.
  • Square mark - square, at least 192 x 192 px, for dark areas, the admin area and the phone home-screen icon.
  • Favicon - the small browser-tab mark.

Upload a square mark and it replaces the AlumDeck mark everywhere: the admin area, the icon someone gets when they add your site to a phone home screen (Android and iPhone), and the browser tab too if you have not uploaded a separate favicon.

"Offer the site as an installable app" controls whether members see an Install the app prompt in the member area (Settings > Member profiles has the switch for the prompt itself). Only a member's own membership card and event tickets are kept on their phone for use without signal; no other signed-in page is stored.

Theme & colours

Four colours: primary, accent, dark surface, page background.

Leave them blank and you get the packaged palette, which is designed and contrast-checked. Set them and they override it. There is no half-way state - a blank field injects nothing at all, so an untouched install looks exactly like the design as drawn.

If you set colours, check them against white text before you commit. A brand colour that looks right on a letterhead is often too light behind white type. (Where the site uses the accent colour for small text, it darkens it automatically until it is readable.)

Homepage

The front page is blocks, reorderable, each one on or off. Turn off what you have no content for - an empty "Upcoming events" block looks worse than no block. The homepage can also use the page-builder blocks (image and text, gallery, people, questions, video or map, appeal, columns).

Modules

Whole features, on or off - more than fifty of them. The original ones: news, events, event tickets and door check-in, photo galleries and the archive, history with notable alumni and memorials, giving, the member area and registration, discussion forums, association documents, site-wide search, surveys, mentoring, volunteering and the job board. Since then: membership dues, perks, sponsors, groups and chapters, messages, the member map, a business directory, forms, elections, custom reports, mentoring programmes, badges and challenges, giving days, fundraising pages, matching gifts, funds, pledges, a shop, seating, multi-day events, the developer API and webhooks, social and single sign-on, text messages, news feeds, contacts and more. Each switch on Settings > Modules says what leaves the admin and which pages close when it is off. Most of the newer ones start off; seven start on (groups and chapters, the activity feed, messages, the business directory, class notes, member referrals and QR sign-up forms).

Turn off what you are not ready to run. A mentoring programme with nobody to mentor, or a survey page with no surveys, makes an association look inactive. You can switch them on later and nothing is lost.

Content

  • Pages - free-form pages, written as one text or built from blocks (see the page builder)
  • Posts - news, stories and spotlights
  • Events - in person, online or both, with RSVPs, optional tickets (free or paid) checked at the door, templates and reports
  • History timeline - your institution's history
  • Galleries - photo albums and the archive; an album can belong to an event
  • Committee - who is on it, with their role, year group and photo
  • In memoriam - handled separately from posts, deliberately
  • Documents - minutes, accounts and notices, each for the public, members or the committee

The example content, if you ticked the box during installation, says in its own text that it is an example, so nobody has to guess what is safe to delete. Delete all of it once you have your own. The privacy policy and terms of use are always added: they are templates, each opening with a note to you - have them checked, edit them, then delete the note.

Members

Members register themselves and appear in the directory once approved - or the committee adds and imports them and sends invitations (see Running your association). Each member decides, under My profile & privacy in the member area, who can see each of their details: all members, only their own year group, or nobody; email and phone start hidden. Decide what your committee will say about the directory before you invite anyone, not after.

Email

Every email goes out under your association's name; newsletters sent from Email campaigns also use your primary colour and logo.

Until email is set up under Settings > Email, the site writes emails to its log file instead of sending them: nobody can confirm a registration or reset a password, and no one hears from you. The admin dashboard says so until it is fixed. See Installing AlumDeck.

Every optional email carries a one-click unsubscribe link and a link to the member's own email preferences page (no sign-in needed), where they choose at once, weekly, monthly or off for news and for community email.

Bounces

When an email cannot be delivered, the receiving server sends a bounce report back to the message's return address. AlumDeck can read those reports from one mailbox and put dead addresses on Undeliverable addresses for you, so no newsletter goes to them again.

  1. In your hosting control panel, create a mailbox used for nothing else, such as bounces@your-domain.org, on the same domain as your From address.
  2. On Settings > Email > Bounces, enter it as the Bounce address, then the mailbox's incoming server (usually mail.your-domain.org), port 993, the user name (usually the full address) and its password, which is stored encrypted. Save, then press Check now.
  3. From then on AlumDeck signs in every 10 minutes over IMAP with SSL/TLS and reads what has arrived. Last check on the same screen says when it last looked and what it found, or the error if it could not sign in.

What happens:

  • Newsletters, digests, announcements, reminders and every other email with an unsubscribe link are sent with a return address such as bounces+k3j9...@your-domain.org. The tag after the + stands for the one person the email went to, so a report is understood even when it names nobody, and a forged report cannot name anyone. Personal and account email (sign-in codes, password resets) keeps its usual return address.
  • A permanent failure (a status code starting with 5, such as 5.1.1 "no such user") puts the address on the list at once, with the reason "Bounced (address does not exist)". Three temporary failures (mailbox full, server busy) within 30 days do the same. A full mailbox (5.2.2), a delivery that ran out of time (5.4.7) and a refusal by policy (5.7.x, which usually means your server was blocked, not that the address is dead) count as temporary.
  • A report AlumDeck has acted on is deleted from the mailbox. Everything else - out-of-office replies, delay warnings, a message a person sent - is left unread; clear it from webmail now and then.

Things to know:

  • SPF: receiving servers check the return address's domain. With the bounce address on the same domain as your From address, the SPF record you already have covers it; on another domain, that domain's SPF record must allow your server too.
  • The mailbox must accept addresses with a + tag (plus addressing). cPanel mail does.
  • Mailboxes that only allow OAuth sign-in - Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace accounts where password sign-in for IMAP is switched off - are not supported. Use a mailbox on your own hosting.
  • If you send through a relay service (Brevo, Mailgun, Postmark, Amazon SES), it usually replaces the return address with its own and keeps its own list of addresses that bounce; check that list in its dashboard. Some SMTP services refuse a return address that is not your own mailbox's; if bulk email stops after you set a bounce address, clear it.

Things that are not settings

Honest list, so you are not hunting for a switch that does not exist.

Page layoutsBuilt-in pages have a fixed structure; their words are on Settings > Page copy. Your own pages can be built from blocks, full width or with a side column.
Multiple institutionsOne install serves one association.

Two things that used to be on this list now exist: your own member profile questions (People > Profile fields) and a REST API with webhooks (the Developer API module, see Integrations).

If one of these is blocking you, tell us through the contact form. It is useful for us to know which of them people actually hit.

Stuck on something this guide does not cover?

Write to the people who build AlumDeck through the contact form. We aim to reply within one working day, Monday to Friday: a target, not a guarantee.

Type a word, or start with one of these pages.

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