The current architecture is a standard LAMP-style web interface on top of a SQL database backend. This is a simple architecture but rather inflexible, since the ONLY way to access the database (other than raw direct access via mysql) is the web interface.
The target architecture for this project divides the app into a client, daemon server, and database back end. The daemon provides a fixed API encapsulating general business logic that any number and type of client can use to manipulate the volunteer data.