CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I just finished volunteering for a organization that was holding an event. This event is occurs annually and in past they have used home grown solutions which have given them multiple problems while their attendance has increased constantly. So this year we did some research and I convinced them to use civicrm.

Overall they had a very positive experience, most attendees to the conference and the volunteers registering people had very positive comments and I firmly believe a major part was due to the civicrm. So I would like to pass the positive feedback and my thanks to civicrm developers and community.

Some of the highlights about deployment were:

1) Defined 2 events for the conference a) For regular attendees b) For exhibiters (this was not initially planned but looking at the ease of defining an event we decided to have exhibiters register online).

2) We had some unique requirements for event attendees for those of you who are regular you might have seen my posts around multiple registrations per email address and the workaround I posted

3) Midway through the event registration period we did an upgrade to the new version of civicrm and that went without a single problem (well after I read documentation on how to move from test to live site)

4) Developed some custom templates and javascript and it was very easy to do.

5) Developed some custom screens using direct civicrm apis for onsite registrations and quicker processing of conference attendees and overall it was very smooth.

There were some lesons learnt and things I would like to see in the event registration module but I will save that for a follow-on post. I would like to end on a very positive note, I just got contacted by another conference organizer after they saw our system and were very interested in using the software I used. I think that just sums up how good civicrm was.
 

Sorry just took a long break .... following up on my previous note.  One of the requirements for the installation was having the ability to register multiple people with same email. Also there were multiple price levels, student/senior discounts, children under 9 were free and a maximum of 200 per family. With all these price options I changed the template to auto calculate the fee based on the profile options selected. For instance if a user entered their age to be 25 their fees was 50, if they were a student the price changed to 40. All this was handled via javascript, finally if the family's total was above 200 then they were charged a maximum of 200. Finally since the total amount due could not be calculated until all the attendees were entered I modified the paypal (ipn) processing to happen after the final confirmation page, had to modify some of the core code for this. But basically I changed the flow to have a review page before redirecting to paypal.

Additionally lot registrations were done offline i.e by personal calls by volunteers who then entered the data, unfortunately the volunteers were sometimes logged into their accounts while registering others which caused override of the data.

Finally during the actual event the custom form was used to search users with a particular last name/first or email. In case of first/last it showed all the matches selecting a particular match a primary registrant and all the secondary registrants were retrieved. The form also provided a way to modify any  data and mark all the records primary & secondary as attendee's.  I could not figure out a way to change status of both primary/secondary registrants easily from default screens, hence the custom form. I also integrated with the fpdf  to print the badges for the attendees from the custom forms had to use the newer version compared to the version in civicrm somehow the version shipping with civicrm didnot work.

I also wrote a lot of custom reports for looking at data based on the fields in the custom profile fields like age, state, paid and paylater options. I am really glad to see the reporting capability in 3.0, look forward to trying it out.

Lobo, I will try to figure out how to best post the custom javascript/template code I did.