CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I am currently trying to set up a drupal/CiviCRM site that would serve one main purpose- event registration for short courses my company teaches.  I am still on the fence if CiviCRM is overkill, or if it would be something worth tackling that I would grow into.  Any thoughts/tips on how to accomplish my goal would be appreciated.

First, some background.  Our company is offering paid short courses several times per year.  In drupal, we have created course objects, which have a few different access levels based on roles.  For example, for our spring 2011 computation course, we have a few roles: S2011_Comp_Enrolled, S2011_Comp_Instructor, and S2011_Comp_Admin.   A user on our site without any of these roles is able to see the marketing side of the course- detailed description, testimonials, where it will be held, enrollment fees, link to register, etc.  A user who has the S2011_Comp_Enrolled role also sees links to (and can follow said links) course information reserved for students, e.g.: course materials, course updates, link to reserve hotel rooms at the course rate, etc.  Things we don't want the whole world to see.  _Instructor and _Admin roles have the ability to update content on these pages.

Enter CiviCRM.  I am interested in using CiviCRM to allow paid registration for our courses, directly on our site.  We have merchant/Authorize.net gateway accounts, proper SSL certs, and are all ready to begin taking credit cards online.  I like that CiviCRM would take care of course lists, name badges, etc.. for us.  However, I am having trouble getting everything working together.  My ideal workflow is as follows:

1. We set up a course, and course roles in Drupal.
2. We set up an event in CiviCRM, with proper pricing (early bird special price, academic student price, etc..), that works through our payment gateway.  We are also able to specify a Drupal role to assign students who register (the _Enrolled role created in step 1).
3. A user comes to our site, and after reading the marketing material, goes to register for the course.
4. A form pops up requesting the relevant info from the user: Name, Affiliation, Title, Email, requested Username (if they don't have a drupal acc yet), Billing Address, CC info, Registration type (General or Univ. Student).
5. The CC is charged- if successful, and the user is not logged into Drupal, a new drupal account is created (otherwise the rest is associated with their logged in drupal account).
6. The user is added in CiviCRM as an event registrant.  In addition, their drupal account is given the role specified in step 2.
7. Now the user has access to all of the "top secret" course stuff that only registrants get access to.

I've got much of this working in CiviCRM/Drupal currently.  However, I am having issues with having CiviCRM assign a drupal role upon successful enrollment.  After some conversations in the irc channel, it was suggested I look into using hooks.  I've been reading up, but a couple of questions remain-

1. How would I generate a drop down for the page to build CiviEvents which would allow me to pick an Enrolled role to assign upon registration?  I am assuming that along with a hook to generate this dropdown (though which hook this is, I have no idea), I'd need to add some field to the events database table to track the associated roll?

2. Which hook would I be calling to add the roll upon successful registration?

3. Am I thinking about this the wrong way?  Is there a better way to approach what I want to do?  Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

I would consider approaching this differently. Create a small Drupal module to check a person's participation in an event before allowing him access to course materials. Presuming you want this for mutiple courses:

1. In your Drupal node(s) you create a way to store a reference to the relevant CiviEvent--whether it's open text (low tech) or a dropdown of events (high tech).

2. When anyone attempts to view such a node, your custom module first looks to see if they are a participant of the relevant event. This would be if they do not have a role which overrides this, such as Admin. So for non-admin and non-staff etc, the module checks their participation. If it's there, then OK, and if not, then the code denies them access.

The code can know which nodes are restricted via a CCK field or via the node type etc.

I would think this would be simpler.