Events registration management made easy, right there in your CMS

Letting site visitors know that you have exciting events coming up is just the first step in building attendance and audience engagement. You also need to make it easy for guests to register for those events, and your team needs flexible management tools that help you keep all those dates, attendees and waiting lists organized.

At Mugo Web, we’ve developed an events registration solution that combines the best of our Mugo Calendar with our Custom Forms solution to provide a fluid, feature-rich experience for both site editors and visitors. Our solution supports different registration fields per event, automated wait lists, and registrant e-mail alerts – all integrated into a single CMS, eZ Platform.

And of course, these events are promoted to site visitors through a variety of channels and site elements.

Easy user flow for site visitors

Here’s how our event registration solution works on the front end:

Site visitors access events as usual, either by calls to action or links, or through the Events Calendar, as shown in the image below:

When they click a specific event date from the calendar, or select a specific date on the event listing page, the system displays a registration form. This form includes a variety of helpful information, including the event’s capacity and if there is a waiting list available:

After submitting the form, registrants are presented a confirmation message:

The system also sends the registrant an e-mail containing registration information:

The best of two site components, working together

Our event registration solution is a prime example of how two ideas can be combined into a value-added solution. In fact, that’s the whole concept behind content management systems – combining a set of features and components to make the life of editors, developers, and even readers easier. By making necessary adaptations to smoothly integrate parts, we not only solve a problem but also reduce development costs by reusing available components.

In the case of our events registration solution, we already had a robust solution in hand with our Mugo Calendar. Editors can create and post events without any restriction or limitation, including the possibility of creating recurring event and exceptions.

But in cases where an editor wants to manage attendance at an event via registrations, we needed to add some new functionality, including allowing visitors to register to an individual event date or an entire series of events.

Another key feature is setting and automatically managing attendance limits and wait lists. Editors can specify a certain number of registration spots available and a number of spots for the wait list. Users are registered in the main list up to the specified limit, then any additional registrations are stored in the wait list.

The system automatically moves registrants from the wait list to the main list when a registrant cancels. And site managers can also cancel registrations in the back end or edit registration details, if needed.

Simple management for site managers

Here's how the workflow looks like in the back end:

After creating an event, editors create its Registration Form. The following image illustrates its field options:

The fields list is standardized and editors can easily drag and drop the items from Inactive to Active status to build the registration form.

For this event there are two distinct lists:

• Registration list: The list containing the current registered users, limited by the Registration Limit field.
• Wait list: The list containing users who will take the place of users in the registration list in case of cancellation, limited by the Wait List Limit field.

We also allow editors to provide an e-mail address that should receive notifications about newly submitted entries in the Recipient field (this field even allows multiple addresses, separated by commas).

Editors can specify if the registration should be per event or for the whole event series – this feature is especially useful for recurring events. For example, if a "parent and tot" event happens each Tuesday morning, parents would be allowed to register for a specific date. Conversely, patrons for an ongoing series of "Excel Lesson" instructional events would want to register for the entire series.

As soon as the form is published, editors can keep track and manage registration entries directly within eZ Platform, as seen in the image below:

Editors can filter the registrations per event date, export to CSV format, and edit or even cancel entries.

All the tools you need in one place

We think our events registration solution is a smart answer that offers a lot of useful functionality directly within your CMS, without having to bolt-on a third-party events management system. If you're interested in learning more about our events registration system, read our case study about the Marigold & Peace Library System websites, and contact us to set up a demo.