Thread

I am the programmer for http://www.thehealingcycle.ca.  The Healing Cycle is a cycling event that raises money for paliative care at a hospital.  They are looking to be able to manage some of the content on the site, which I know EE would be completely capable of.  I am not currently using a framework of any type and want to do so to clean up my code a bit.  The site has grown considerably over the last few years.  Here’s the thing… I need riders to be able to register for the event, which requires them paying a registration fee.  There are many different categories of rider…. individuals, teams and team riders, families and family riders, families under a greater team etc.. We also allow donors to pledge money on behalf of a rider.
I also have a back end site where they are able to run reports etc… We break everything down by year in the reports.  I am very familiar with CakePHP and was going to use it to get my code under control but that doesn’t give us CMS capability.  How difficult / easy would it be to do the registrations/donations and how easy would it be for me to report on the data (not sure how EE builds the underlying tables as I assume I lose control of that?).
Any tools or add-ons that I would need/want to use?

Hi, Conundrumb - There isn’t currently a way to have RSVPs (ie: registering to run a pre-posted event), or run reports of the type you need.  If you are a coder, and you need other aspects of EE such as membership, a news section, etc - then EE can help out with a large part of your project, and you can custom code as a module the rest of what you need.  EE 2 sits on CodeIgniter as well.  Here is the Development API.

Please let me know if you have any other questions.

I suspected that I would likely need to do custom programming for the registration process etc…
I do see that there is a ‘Simple Commerce’ add-on.  Would this be suitable to use to handle making payments for donations and registrations, or is that something I would need to develop myself or possibly purchase a different plugin for?

Sounds like I would just re-design my reporting system using Code Ingniter perhaps.

Hi, Conundrumb - for registering for events, yes.  For creating member accounts, that’s included in EE.

You can use the Simple Commerce module to make purchases; it won’t accept free-form donations though.  There are several eCommerce options that may be potentially useful to you.

I suspected that I would likely need to do custom programming for the registration process etc…
I do see that there is a ‘Simple Commerce’ add-on.  Would this be suitable to use to handle making payments for donations and registrations, or is that something I would need to develop myself or possibly purchase a ...

The simple commerce would work with paypal as a good solution for donations but if you also want to look at another option, there are several at http://devot-ee.com. Perhaps Check on carthrob for more advanced solutions and compare it to the simple commerce module to see if you need more than the native module.

Does that help, Conundrumb? Please let us know in case you need anything else, thanks.

Yes thanks,

This project is a bit more complicated and I figured I would definitely need to do custom programming.

I am going to buy a license to start learning the ropes and will use it on a simpler project or two first and then once I know my way around, I will be ready to tackle a rewrite of this one.

Thanks again.

Hi, Conundrumb,

Happy to help, and that sounds like a great plan.  Also check out Train-ee and EE Screencasts to get quickly up to speed with EE.

Please start a thread if you have any other questions.