Building a registration site with Drupal, Paul Driver

I’m catching up with my notes from the Drupal Camp Yorkshire conference that took place in Leeds.

It’s always nice to have a teardown of a real life site or a similar kind of demo. I was gutted to miss the one at Drupal Camp Scotland about the Lush website (hey, how about coming to Drupal Camp North East…please?).  Paul Driver‘s demonstration of how to build an event registration site was a useful reminder of how quickly things can change in CMS world. And that cupcake ipsum is awesome.

While you can do something as simple as use the webform and the commerce module, these days it’s all about using Entity Registration. One of the advantages is the the developers are deliberately keeping it light with few dependencies, to the point that you can even use it for non-date specific entities such as buying a webinar. Field collection is also useful for dealing with multiple bookings by one person (e.g. an admin person booking training for the company staff or a parent with children). You can use commerce_registration if you want to force people to pay before registering, or alternatively use registration_commerce/Registration Commerce 2 (which Driver prefers) if you’d like to allow for invoices and the like. The fact that the names are interchangeable isn’t at all confusing. At all.

He ran through a demo site (including said cake ipsum) before showing one he’d prepared earlier: the Skipton Extended Learning for All (SELFA) site. Someone from the audience offered a complex one that they’d worked on, Cherry Hinton Baptist Church, which notably uses Field Collection to deal with some of the extras.

That said, this could change soon. The official Drupal Conference Organising Distribution (CoD) is running off a new module called Ticket. It’s currently in alpha but based on what it promises to offer could become the new standard registration module.

The video of Driver’s talk is available on Youtube.