Sync Member Progress Report Data - WordPress for Toastmasters*

Club website administrators now have the option to allow the WordPress for Toastmasters software to backup and sync member progress report data, meaning data about speeches and other roles filled within the club. For the small but growing number of members who belong to multiple clubs that manage their agendas this way, this makes it possible to get a consolidated view of your activity across multiple clubs.

For example, I can now sign into the website of my home club Club Awesome (www.clubawesome.org) and view a list of speeches completed both there and at Online Presenters (op.toastmost.org), the online club I recently founded.

How speech data syncs between sites. — Speeches given at other clubs are displayed with the domain of the other club shown beneath manual, project, and title.

If you are giving speeches from the same manual at a couple of different clubs, this gives you (and your VP of Education) a better way of tracking your progress.

When I view the progress reports screen on clubawesome.org, I see a message showing how many records have been uploaded and how many have been downloaded from the repository on wp4toastmasters.com.

Club websites hosted on toastmost.org (a free service of the WordPress for Toastmasters project) share a common user/member database. If you belong to multiple clubs that employ that service, the data sharing is automatic.

To work across multiple independently hosted websites, the data sync service must be turned on by an administrator at each site. When this is enabled, updates are transmitted to wp4toastmasters.org and recorded in a database there, indexed by Toastmasters Member ID. (The Toastmasters Member ID must be recorded on the user profile for this to work). The data shared does not include personal data such as phone numbers or email addresses. It is limited to records such as speech dates, titles, and manual projects, as well as the dates on which members filled other roles such as Toastmaster of the Day or Ah Counter.

In addition to allowing data to sync between club websites, this provides a backup of your records of club member achievements.

I can imagine this feature may be disallowed by some clubs, such as corporate clubs with websites hosted on company servers where IT has strict security policies. Or at least, the IT department may need to be convinced that this is safe.

For those who want or need the technical details:

Data is encoded as JSON, transmitted as an HTTPS PUT to wp4toastmasters.com over SSL and recorded in a SQL database. If the database contains records for the same member from a different club website, those are downloaded as JSON.