CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hello Everyone,

Once again, before I dig into CiviCRM, I want to see if anyone can help me build a hopefully elegant solution to the problem of automatically creating a clone of an event each week.

The Situation

I need to create a new "Farmers Market" event each week, so Merchants can easily RSVP and be provided with instant confirmation.

From what I have read so far, creating recurring events can be somewhat painful in CiviCRM and perhaps not even the solution I am looking for.

From my understanding of CiviCRM I really need to create/clone a unique event (Farmers Market) each week instead of creating a recurring event. First, this provides the organization with the easiest way of tracking RSVP's. Second, over-time the RSVPs will become responsible for handling automated payments and handling other important payment information, so I probably want to keep them as simple possible.

7 Farmer Market Locations

Let's assume each Market has a unique time and date that is 100% consistent every week. For example every Monday from 10:00am to 2:00pm.

Civic Center -  Sunday & Thursday
Hayward - Monday
Grand Lake - Tuesday
Clement - Wednesday
Stonestown - Friday
San Rafael - Thursday

250+ Merchants

Each Merchant attends multiple markets and is currently being tracked with paper and pencil. It's costing the organization $1,000's in resource and staff time, so I am trying to provide a more seamless way of confirming RSVPs using using smartphones and real-time tracking by staff.

The "gotcha" is RSVP's are being treated really as more of roll-call, so Staff and Merchants should actually be able to RSVP while attending the event... I know it's not the most elegant solution, but it seemed like the right fit for the current CiviCRM features.

The Staff will be provided with an attendance sheet (rendered by Views Megarow) so they can toggle attendance using the RSVP checkbox in real-time at the Markets.

What's The Solution

TLDR: What's the best method for automatically creating roughly 500+ events each year? Should I create a module that will store all the dates and simply hook into the CiviCRM API, so when the module is turned on the module will incrementally make new events once a week or once a month? Or is there a better way to manage Event creation maybe using Feeds Import or Rules?

I know I am going to probably change the architecture of the Event Module several times over the course of it's life, so I don't want it to create the events all at once.
Instead, I want the module to incrementally add a new event each week, unless I tell it otherwise, so I when version 2.0 comes out it I don't have to overwrite existing events and have it get all messy.

In other words, am I looking at an up-hill battle when it comes to developing a module for CiviCRM's Event creation process or is the right fit?