Alumni Development Notes
Architecture Overview
- No traditional database tables for members; instead, we write to Google Sheets via
DateSheetsAdapter (see alumni/gsuite_adapter.py).
- Celery tasks (
alumni/tasks.py) handle all side effects—sheet writes, email dispatch, audit logging, and token emails.
- Two lightweight models live in Django:
AlumniEmailRecipient – list of admin recipients for notifications.AlumniUpdateToken – UUID tokens for edit links with a 24h validity window.
AlumniSignUpForm collects create/update data. The operation field defaults to CREATE but the same form class is reused for updates.alumni.views.alumni_signup validates captcha, checks duplicates against Sheets, and enqueues handle_alumni_signup.delay().alumni_update_verify asks for an email, creates a token, and fires send_token_email.delay().alumni_update_form verifies the token, pre-fills the form, and on POST triggers the same handle_alumni_signup task with operation=UPDATE.
Task Flow
handle_alumni_signup pattern-matches on operation:
- CREATE →
handle_create appends a row to the member sheet, generates a payment reference number, sends both alumni and admin emails, and logs to the audit sheet.
- UPDATE →
handle_update finds the row by email, updates only the editable columns, logs the action, and deletes the token.
send_token_email verifies the request email actually exists in the sheet before sending a template-based message.
Configuration
settings.ALUMNI_SETTINGS must contain JSON with Google API credentials and sheet IDs. Missing/invalid settings are logged as errors and disable the integration.- Email templates live under
templates/members/ and templates/alumni/.
Extending
- To expose recipient management in admin, register
AlumniEmailRecipient with a simple ModelAdmin (currently unregistered).
- Consider encrypting the token payload or adding rate limiting to avoid brute-force attempts.
- For better observability, persist audit logs inside Django in addition to Google Sheets.