Online Event Management - Rounding Out the Corners

Online event registration has always proved tricky for website developers. Even with the rise of social media, capturing information from participants has always been subject to the nuanced details of organizing events in the real world. How many people are allowed to attend? Do people have to pay to get in? Where am I storing the information we collect so it is most useful to event organizers? These kinds of questions lead to very specific, focused solutions within open-source event management systems, and make it difficult to address the needs of general audiences.

Here at Trellon we have been dealing with event management solutions for a long time. Drupal is a great platform for promoting events, but there are no general, one-size-fits-all solutions for capturing registration information. EventFinder was an early stab at a complete solution, which had its own benefits and drawbacks, and eventually was scrapped in favor of Event- and Location-based solutions. e-Commerce added the ability to have paid event attendance, but even this created some challenges in terms of how the data was stored. Signup and Signup Pay brought developers closer to a general solution, but there are some common use cases that these tools have yet to address:

1. Member-only events, where only certain users have permission to register.
2. Early-bird registration discounts where the price goes down based on the day.
3. Questions from event organizers to get more details from the registrant.

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Courtesy : http://www.trellon.com