If you’ve been following NPPatch on GitHub, thanks for finding your way here. If this is your first contact with the project — welcome. We’re glad you’re here.
This forum is a new home for community conversation about NPPatch. It’s where we’ll talk about how to use the package, what it should become, how the project is run, and everything in between.
Why we’re moving off GitHub Discussions
NPPatch isn’t only for developers, and it never has been. The community we’re building includes admins, fundraisers, accidental Salesforce administrators, consultants, and people who’ve inherited an NPSP org and are trying to figure out what to do next. Asking all of those people to create a GitHub account quietly tells a lot of people that this conversation isn’t for them.
It is for them. So we needed a space that felt like it.
A forum like this one is more familiar to most people. You sign up with an email address. You read what’s there. You reply if you want to. You can subscribe to a category, get notified by email, and respond by replying to that email if you don’t feel like coming back to the site.
GitHub will keep being the home for the code, the issues, and the technical contribution workflow. That part is working. This forum is for everything around it.
What’s here
Six categories to start, kept deliberately simple:
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General — anything that doesn’t have a more specific home, including introductions
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Announcements — official updates from the team
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Help — questions about installing, configuring, or using NPPatch
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Ideas — feature ideas and discussion of where NPPatch should go
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Governance — how the project is run and how that should evolve
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Show & Tell — share what you’ve built, figured out, or learned the hard way
There’s also a Site Feedback category for meta discussion about the forum itself. If something here isn’t working for you, that’s where to say so.
Each category has an “About” post that goes into a little more detail about what fits there. Don’t stress about getting it right — if something lands in the wrong category, we’ll just move it.
What’s happening with the GitHub Discussions
We’re not deleting anything. The existing GitHub Discussions will stay readable, and the substantive ongoing conversations — the governance thread and the “what did NPSP get right” thread — are being brought over here so they can keep growing in the new space.
If you’ve participated in a thread on GitHub and want to keep going, look for it here in the next week or two. If we miss something you cared about, let us know and we’ll bring it over.
Going forward, GitHub Discussions will redirect people to this forum. GitHub Issues stays put — that’s still the right place for confirmed bugs and pull request discussion.
A few practical things
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Take a look at the community guidelines. They’re short. The summary: be kind, stay on topic, help each other, flag things rather than fighting them.
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Introduce yourself in General if you feel like it. Tell us what brought you here and what you’re hoping to do with NPPatch. It’s an easy first post and it helps the rest of us get to know who’s around.
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You can reply to most notifications by email. If forum interfaces aren’t your thing, you can do almost everything from your inbox.
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If you’re stuck on something, ask. That includes “I’m not sure how this forum works.” There are no dumb questions about a forum that’s three days old.
One more thing
NPPatch exists because a lot of people decided that the work of maintaining good nonprofit software shouldn’t depend on any one company’s roadmap. The forum exists for the same reason — so that the conversation around the software has somewhere to live that the community actually owns.
Thanks for being here.