CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

If you can outline your needs, we can help you determine if CiviCRM/CiviEvent is a good fit. Here's a quick overview of what I view as the benefits/weaknesses (I use CiviCRM with several not for profit trade associations).

Obviously the biggest benefit is an open source, free, integrated system that can handle all your membership and allow real-time event registration for users. That's hard to get in a commercial product without shelling out a lot of dollars. I think CiviEvent, specifically, is on the under-developed side of the product, but there are a number of expected improvements and expanded functionality that are targeted for the next release (2.0). If your registration options are pretty straightforward (e.g. your registrants simply select from a list of registration options), then CiviEvent may fit your needs. There is price set functionality in the current release, which allows you to create different sets of registration options which can be combined within a single form (e.g. four registration options, 3 meal options, 5 break-out session options, etc. -- all combined into a single form). There's no business logic, so you can't restrict the options visible, or create multi-page forms that show different options based on previously selected options. There are also some bugs in the price set tools when registering people through the administration page (the front end user registration works fine; contact me if you need hacks for the backend tools). Those should be fixed in 2.0.

In general, the backend tools for CiviEvent to view registrants is simple but sufficient. You can easily pull up a list of registrants for a given event and take actions on the list (export, email, etc.). There is something of a disconnect (in my mind) between the registration for an event and the corresponding contribution (payment), but some of that is slated for improvement in 2.0.

So in general, I wouldn't say that CiviEvent is incredible robust. But it does provide some good functionality in an integrated solution.

One other thing --
I am a Joomla user, and there's no easy way to create a calendar module in your website that pulls from the list of events coming up. CiviEvent does allow you to view a iCal or RSS feed of events, and I believe some Joomla calendar extensions are looking to implement iCal feed capability, so that may address the need. I believe in Drupal the ability to create a calendar from the CiviEvent data is built-in, but someone else will need to confirm that.

Hope this helps.
-Brian