Circulation Manager for an Academic Journal?

kokaubeam asks: "I've been working for several years in the publication office of a small academic journal and am currently in the process of reworking our circulation management system. For a variety of reasons, a web-based system seems to make the most sense, and although I'm not too concerned about just sitting down and hacking one out, I'd much rather contribute to an existing open source project (if one exists that would fit the bill) than reinvent the wheel. After several hours scouring the web, I've yet to come up with anything that seems even close. I need something to manage the names and (postal) addresses of subscribers, securely store payment information, and print slip sheets or mailing labels. Any language would be fine, but PHP would be ideal since I'd like to integrate the subscription system with manuscript and book review management systems I'm working on. Does Slashdot have any suggestions for projects that I may have overlooked?"

Seriously, look at Ruby on Rails

[Vaevictis666]

Just spend an hour or two looking at the now-ubiquitous recipe book demo [rubyonrails.com], and see if a system like that could suit your site-building needs.

Looking at what my co-worker just managed to pull out of his hat in a week or so (combination SOAP/XML-HTTP client with revision control on the data, for web-hosting-ish stuff) you may find the hardest part is finding excuses to not convert your other stuff over :P

The most difficult thing I think you'd run into based on your spec is the label printing stuff, but if you found a web-based solution for it in PHP I'm sure the Ruby version should be comparable. Hell, as far as that goes the easiest way I can think of is just take a copy of Access, point it at your database, and use it to generate the right query and design your labels...

Re:Seriously, look at Ruby on Rails

[ceejayoz]

Perhaps I'm missing something about #2... but...

$sorted_array = array_multisort($array, [arguments]);

OJS

[suid77]

While its not strictly a circulation managment system, Open Journal Systems ( http://www.pkp.ubc.ca/ojs/ [pkp.ubc.ca]) is about the most robust, open source journal managment system around -- including some functionality for subscription based journals.

Version 2 was released within the past few weeks, and may include some of the features you're looking for -- and if not, this is probably the most mature system of it's type if you're looking to add/contribute.

I'm guessing that printing mailing labels from a web interf

Labels

[bobbozzo]

FWIW, it's not hard to make PDFs from PHP, etc. (for the labels)

If you have a PostScript 3 printer, you can send them directly to the printer without a driver.

egw

[baldass_newbie]

eGroupWare [egroupware.org] might do the trick. Especially since you didn't mention CMS as a need. Otherwise I would throw Drupal [drupal.org] out there, too.

xaraya

[an_mo]

Xaraya is extremely extensible and customizable. I would give it a try if I were you. www.xaraya.com

SQL-Ledger

[penfern]

It sounds to me like you're trying to do accounts/client management, not journal management. Easily, you might only need to tweek the label printing functionality. You could even look into enhancing their support for "subscription" based services, and you would have everything you wanted.

http://www.sql-ledger.org/ [sql-ledger.org]

Try a MySQL/PHP combo

[computernut]

Just a thought, you did mention you wanted a "work in progress" kind of solution (OSS), but if you could get the data onto MySql or some other OSS database, a set of PHP/SQL queries could read off the required data (addresses) and then you could probably format and send to printer (am not too familiar with playing around with printer drivers and relate formatting)

-C'nut