As part of improving our internal processes and making support and volunteers’ tasks easier, in August 2025 we started a program to move away from Your Membership (YM).
HMGS, Inc. (HMGS) has used Your Membership since 2013. The YM software was first released in 1999, and although it looked “okay” from a user’s perspective, administration of the environment was complex, non-intuitive, prone to errors, and lacking some capabilities. YM fulfilled four functions for HMGS:
- Membership Management
- Event Management
- Web Pages
- Community
The first phase to move away from this platform was the migration of Event Management to TableTop.Events (TTE) for Fall In! 2025. That implementation had the benefits of reducing the workload on the volunteer staff (pre-show), and improving the accessibility of information (to name two major ones).
The second phase has been to move the Web Page creation and service to a new WordPress platform. This gives us greater flexibility in the creation of pages to display content in a feature-rich manner – including direct access to our large photo library stored on HMGS’s Google Workspace Shared Drives without having to copy them to the WordPress server (as we had to do with YM). It is also easier to find volunteers with WordPress administration skills, than it was to find volunteers with YM administrative skills.
The Web Page phase started with the creation of a set of new historicon.org pages ahead of Historicon 2025 to complement the migration to TTE. The same has been done for Fall In! 2025 and Cold Wars 2026, and now the hmgs.org pages are being migrated.
A new platform for Membership is currently being evaluated. For now HMGS Membership (annual dues, etc.) continues to be handled on YM.
Additionally we are evaluating what Community functions should be made available in the new environment.
Do you have expertise with WordPress? Do you want to volunteer to help with HMGS’s web sites? If so, email the IT Director – it_director@hmgs.org, stating your experience and how much time you can commit to volunteering.
