Association documents
The AGM minutes, somewhere better than an email thread
Notices, minutes and accounts, published to your members and nobody else. The attachments live outside the web root and are handed out only after the software has checked who is asking.
- Who can read them
- Signed-in members only, always
- Attachment
- One PDF, JPEG or PNG per document
- Where files sit
- A private disk, not the public folder
- Every change
- Written to the audit log
What a document is
Rich text, one attachment, no public option#
A document has a title, a body written as rich text and optionally one attached file: a PDF, a JPEG or a PNG. That covers the three things associations actually publish: a notice, a set of minutes, and the year's accounts as a scan.
The members-only switch is present, set to on, and disabled in the form. That is deliberate: these documents are never public, and nobody can make them public by accident at ten at night before an AGM.
Where the file actually lives
Outside the web root, behind a check#
Uploaded attachments go to a private disk that is not served by the web server at all. There is no public address, so there is nothing to guess, nothing to leak through a search engine and nothing to share by accident.
When a member opens a document, the file is streamed through a controller that checks the request first. The same private disk holds contact-form attachments and member import files, and all of it is captured in the nightly documents backup, separately from the media backup.
One granularity limit. There is no committee-only tier. Every signed-in member can read every published document, so anything that is genuinely confidential to the office-bearers does not belong here. What you get instead is a clean record: association documents are among the seventeen record types written to the audit log, so who published what, and when, is never a matter of memory.
Questions about association documents#
Where are the attachments stored?
On a private disk outside the part of your hosting that is served to the web, so there is no address anybody can guess. Every download goes through a controller that checks who is asking before it hands the file over.
Can we publish a document to the public site?
No. The members-only switch on a document is deliberately fixed on and cannot be turned off in the form. If something needs to be public, it belongs in a news post or a free-form page instead.
Do members get told when we publish minutes?
Yes, if they have opted in to announcements. New documents are included in the same nightly announcement email as new posts and events, which runs from the scheduler and therefore needs your cron line to be in place.
Is there version history?
No. A document is rich text plus at most one attachment, and editing it replaces what was there. What you do get is the audit log: association documents are one of the seventeen record types where every create, edit and delete is written down with a person, a time and an IP address.
Can we restrict a document to the committee only?
Not with a setting. Every signed-in member sees every published document, so anything that should not reach the whole membership should not go here.
Open the documents screen on the demo
Sign in as a member to read one, then look at the same record in the admin panel.