A forward-compatible way to do recurring events/series?

[jakecivi]

Does anyone have a recommendation for a stopgap measure to enable grouping events in a series (a multi-session event) as will eventually be implemented by this: http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=48398441 ?

I'm trying to find something that's not extremely involved but will also be compatible with or easily migratable to whatever comes out of that project. Students will be able to attend (and register for) the entire series, or just one class at a time (and don't have to come to all the classes).

Or.. perhaps whatever I come up with could help that project in some way?

Thanks.

[Jeremy Proffitt]

There is an MIH (Make it Happen) project underway for this, with major progress made at the 2014 London Sprint. See https://civicrm.org/blogs/deepaksrivastava/core-recursion-recurring-events-engine for details.

[jakecivi]

Thanks. I'm just trying to get a sense of, for a partial solution in the mean time, if it makes sense to try and backport parts of it to 4.5, to just do something quick and separate with an event type and a custom field, or..?

[jakecivi]

An update on this (from irc chat):

The event cart part of Civi would work nicely for this. 2 (2 1/2) modifications need to be made:

1) Add a page to specify a date rule/range and then have all the child events created automatically, copying description and such from parent.
  (optional: make it able to handle changes to existing event descriptions and schedules)
  1.5) Use an "Event Series" event type for the parents, and "Event Series Session" type for the sessions. This will make it easier to migrate later. Could be done via searching for events with null parent_event_id
2) Add a hook to remove the step where a person would select the the conference "slots," because there will only be one slot and one class per slot.
  2.5) Remove the second conference slot option.

Anyone know if this successfully handles showing of event participants for the children event as well as the parent (assuming series participants would show as no-fee participants of the child events, while those who signed up for individual sessions would show up as paying participants)? Assuming so, but want to note that and make sure it doesn't require anything else in order to make sense to people using the admin pages.

[totten]

FWIW: 4.6 aims to be a short release-cycle (with alpha1 aiming for mid/late Dec 2014 and final aiming for Q1 2015), so that may influence how you much time you want to spend on backporting. If I were in your shoes, I'd consider stress-testing 4.6 instead of backporting -- backporting a major feature can be quite difficult in terms of up-front work and on-going maintenance, but stress-testing can be a more finite project and helps other users.

If you're curious about 4.6, there's a demo site and nightly tarballs for trying the latest code:

http://dmaster.demo.civicrm.org/
http://dist.civicrm.org/by-date/latest/master/