I’ve installed a local copy of EE for testing, read a few tutorials and looked at some of the videocasts available. This shows me EE is suitable for fairly standard brochure/news/blogging sites and I’ll probably switch to it from Wordpress for those kinds of sites.

However, is it suitable for more complex projects?

I’m looking for a good platform to develop an events-registration system. It needs to support:

* User registrations for events—from simple to complex forms
* Customised selection of workshops, exhibitions, etc. that a user wants to attend
* eCommerce options for registration payment online
* Confirmation system for sending out emails, reminders, etc
* Easy and quick re-skinning for different clients.

I also need a custom back-end for the client to access so that they can:

* See summaries of all registered users
* See detail for any single user and contact them easily using email link, etc.
* Export all user details to an offline format, that can be imported to another app for preparing event badges, etc.

This is by no means the full spec, but is the basic stuff I need to be able to do. I couldn’t really get a sense from the docs that EE is suitable for this, so any perspective would be gratefully received.

Thanks in advance.

Hi,

This doesn’t exist in EE right now. But we’re building an Events module at Solspace right now. It will take a few months before it’s ready for prime time.

mk

That’s an app in itself!

You can customise EE to do much of this functionality but off the shelf it doesn’t exist so it will either incur development time or additional costs to do it.

Solspace - 23 April 2008 07:21 AM

This doesn’t exist in EE right now. But we’re building an Events module at Solspace right now. It will take a few months before it’s ready for prime time.

OK, thanks for the reply—this is something that won’t happen for a while yet, so maybe your solution will be an option when I’m ready for it.

George Ornbo - 23 April 2008 08:35 AM

That’s an app in itself!

Yep, sure is!  —was just trying to get a handle on if it was the kind of thing EE had support for.

George Ornbo - 23 April 2008 08:35 AM

You can customise EE to do much of this functionality but off the shelf it doesn’t exist so it will either incur development time or additional costs to do it.

OK, that’s pretty much what I thought. Thanks for the input.

From what I can see it looks possible. You’ll need the forum and a plug-in for exporting data, plus you’ll need to manage ecommerce via Paypal.

I would be interested in an Events module from Solspace.

Currently, we do this with an HTML form, MS Access, and Paypal for credit card handling.

It would be nice to streamline this into EE.