Thread

I’m trying to understand how to address the needs of my organization and I need your help! I have a very limited understanding of how databases work so please bear with me.

We need to be able to publish an event and collect detailed registration and payment information. We also need to be able to go back and access this data and have the ability to print them based on country, language, etc. So, a user friendly way to manage data collected from a form. Does ee have this capability out of the box, or do I need to purchase an add-on?

Currently, we do have an existing database that is accessible through a custom front-end developed by our hosting provider. Ideally we would want to somehow link this to our site built in ee. Would you need to understand how expressionengine works in order to make these links from a SAEF?

I’m trying to understand the basic steps that need to be taken to get this done. We’ve basically already built the site in ee2.0. Please let me know if I should clarify something and I appreciate your help. Thanks!

I would suggest a third party solution for event registration. There are several out there, with EventBrite (http://eventbrite.com} being the one I’ve personally worked with the most. It works with both PayPal and Google Checkout. It has very good reporting and is easy to use.

There are others out there as well, which you’ll find if you Google something like “online event registration”.

Thanks jejuna, I’ve never heard of EventBrite and it’s good to know it’s out there. I was kind hoping there was a solution with that kind of functionality that would work within expressionengine itself and play nice with an existing database.

I’m still looking for more direction and would love some other suggestions to build my options.

I’ve actually just finished building a site that sells events. Lots of them. I used Solspace’s Calendar to output the events and CartThrob, a new ecommerce module for EE that handles the registration forms and payment.

So, no need to use an external database. It’s all in EE. Unfortunately for you, both these modules are not yet available for EE 2, but both companies say they are in process of putting out new versions.

It all seems to be working really well.

I think I was severely misunderstanding what a SAEF was used for. Also I didn’t realize how much work needs to be done to combine the existing database used in the office with the database our site uses. In the end we decided to have the same people who developed the front-end also deal with the registration and payment. In this way, I wouldn’t necessarily have to deal with those elements, but just provide a registration link out of our ee site. Would have loved to keep it all in the family but I’m just not knowledgeable enough to do it alone.

When Calendar and CartThrob are ready, I’ll certainly look into them for event and payment solutions. Thanks for the help jejuna.