Multiple Event Registration

[Peter Haight]

We have a client who wants us to implement multiple event registration for them. We're currently evaluating different ways to do this. We'd like to do it in such a way that it could get eventually included in the main code base, so we're looking for some input on what approach would be best for CiviCRM in general.

1. Use Ubercart for the shopping cart and have it build the events through the CiviEvent API after/during checkout. Maybe add some kind of custom field to Ubercart products that associate it with a CiviCRM event.

2. Use Ubercart for the shopping cart and change CiviCRM events to be Drupal nodes and share the same node for the Ubercart product and the CiviCRM event.

3. Build a shopping cart style interface inside CiviEvent.

I'm a little partial to 2, but it seems like the most work and I'm not sure whether the CiviCRM community would think that implementing events on top of Drupal nodes is a good idea. Also not sure it would fit within the budget. Probably too ambitious, but we're willing to consider it if people think that's the direction CiviCRM should take.

[xavier]

They have been discussion and code in the past about displaying civievent in a drupal calendar, if I recall, it somehow created a node for each event (on the top of the civicrm stuff in the civicrm table).

Anyway having a module with
1) a hook that automatically create a node every time an event is created
2) a hook that automatically create participants (using the api) on the ubercart checkout

Should do it and interface pretty easily with civicrm. IMO, as it's quite specific to drupal+ubercart, should stay as a separate module, but we should find a way to better promote the existing modules that exists on the top of civicrm (the drupal guys will probably mention that projects.drupal is the best thing that happened to mankind since the sliced bread, I personally am too dumb to find easily a module among the few zillion that do mostly the same thing).

I'm assuming there is a way of finding all the modules that depend on civicrm, both for joomla and drupal, that should be a good enough starting point.

X+

[Donald Lobo]

hey peter:

can you elaborate a bit more on your client's use case so we can potentially think of some options and solutions

lobo

[Peter Haight]

The client sells classes. Many people sign up for a bunch of classes at a time and the client wants an interface where the user can sign up for a bunch of classes and then pay just once. We're planning on having each class be a CiviCRM event. They have a current web site which does this which we are replacing. On the current website signing up for classes is pretty much a standard shopping cart kind of interface. That's pretty much what we're aiming for on the new site, but we're open to options.

We did look around for some sort of plugin or something that has already taken care of this, but we mostly just found people requesting the feature.

[Donald Lobo]

Did u'll try using PriceSets? would that fit your needs. It basically allows users to choose one or more options from a set of options (which can be grouped etc)

lobo

[Dave Greenberg]

Side note - folks who expose CiviEvents in Drupal Calendar do it using Views2 / Date modules (not by creating nodes as indicated above).

Previous attempts to replicate CiviCRM objects as nodes have not been too successful IMO (CiviNode project for one) - although some folks are using CCK / CiviCRM integration I think to "point" to Civi objects.

If Price Sets don't work for your use case (which they might not if you really need to model each class as a separate event), and you have development resources, I would vote for extending CiviEvent to allow a user to select multiple events and pay once. This definitely has come up pretty often as a requested feature in the community. As a side note, the current data model for storing registrations and payments would support this, since you can link multiple event registration objects (participant records) to a single contribution (payment) via the participant_payment join table.

[dafeder]

Has there been any movement on this? I'm trying to figure out the exact same problem.

[Eileen]

You can create a view of events & use calendar style - in theory this works although I don't know if there are any date format issues.

This is an example of a very basic view of events

http://www.circus.org.nz/

But it's in table style not calendar style (which wouldn't work here because the events are 8 week classes)

[dafeder]

Sorry, I was unclear - I meant I was trying to figure out a way to allow people to register and pay for multiple events at once (classes, in my case).

[Dave Greenberg]

Nope. Using Price Sets where each price set field represents a class is the closest "solution" currently. If that doesn't work for you, you'll need to look at contributing development resources or sponsoring a "Make it Happen" project. Would be good to have a high-level specification of how you think it should work in terms of the event configuration UI and the UI changes for the registration forms.

[dafeder]

Right - price sets are not going to work for my case, or most similar cases I would imagine. I still need the event/participation functionality for each class.

I am still new to CiviCRM so this might not make much sense, but here is how I would imagine it. Obviously the idea would be to avoid building a whole "shopping cart" inside Civi.

We would need to have a new object called "multiple event registration" or something. A single object would need to have a way of referencing multiple events, a sort of event-reference field (like the existing contact-reference field type) that could have multiple values. It would also include a copy of the form for any single event registration. After submitting this registration, the total would be calculated and processed as a contribution, and each individual event participation populated based on the information collected in the multiple event registration object.

So, yeah, easy for me to say, right? I don't have any resources to devote to this right now, and most of this functionality can probably be accomplished with the Ubercart integration tools out there. But ideally, that's how I imagine it happening.

[Dave Greenberg]

Your post raised some questions for me about how this might work from a UI point of view ...

On the event create side ...
Workflow A
1. Create each event separately as usual, specifying description, dates, location, fees (skipping online registration form)
2. Create a Multi-event online registration form where you basically specify which events to include, and the Online Registration configuration details (Profiles to include, confirmation text, thank-you and receipting)

Workflow B
Allow admin to create the events and the "multi-event container" in one pass (perhaps each of the 1st 3 steps has link to insert fieldsets for  "Additional Events".

On the event info / registration side ...
Is there an event/info page for the multi-registration container? Does it show all descriptions, dates and fees for included events? (Maybe in summary with pop-ups for details?)

This might be a good "Make it Happen" project for 4.1 especially if some organization(s) can step up w/ some seed sponsorship funding.

[dafeder]

I don't completely understand Workflow B, but it sounds unnecessarily complicated. I think Workflow A pretty much describes how it should work.

[starleague]

Instead of starting a new one, I just wanted t post the following (Testing server: may disappear anytime:)): http://104.131.177.17/

The ad-hoc link creates a multiple registration.