CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I need to add the option of paying a deposit for an civi-event instead of the full payment, and I am wondering, have an idea where to start, whether it would be better to modify civicrm directly or to create an extension for it? In other words can an extension modify the event workflow like that (adding the option for deposit and creating some kind of object like a shopping cart style item for the remainder of the payments) or do I need to change the code itself to do so?

This is something that certainly belongs in core and we are inching toward the goal of partial payments with CiviAccounts. Depending on your experience you could get involved in the project and help us get there.

Well I am not in a position to be involved in long term programming projects

I would say that your strategy is counter to your stated goal. Let me tell you a true story: once I needed a system that could (among other things) accept partial payments for events. Instead of teaming up with the CiviCRM team to implement this, I went it alone and hacked together my own drupal module. So now I'm the proud owner of a long term programming project for which I'm the sole maintainer. If I had instead collaborated with others to write the code in such a way that it could be incorporated into CiviCRM, then the community of developers would be maintaining the code. Instead I'm stuck with it forever.

It shouldn't be too hard I would assume

Haha, that's a good one. You have much to learn young grasshopper.

So I'll just see if I can hack it in myself 

Well, the benefits of working with rather than against an open source community are not always immediately obvious; many people (myself included) have to find out the hard way. But next year when you're tearing your hair out with upgrades, don't forget I told you so

Work has been funded and is currently in progress for the 4.5 release to support partial payments and changes to existing event registration options - BACK-OFFICE only. Details in these issues:

http://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-13956 (and sub-issues).

We have possible funding for adding support for front-end partial payments - this is under discussion and we'll have a spec/sizing early next week. If your organization(s) are able to participate in funding for this, that would be quite helpful. I'll post back here once we have a spec and defined funding requirements.