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Drupal Case Study - Propel Business Clubs

Submitted by zakiya on July 13, 2010 - 9:25am

Propel Business Clubs is a San Diego network for local medium- and large-scale businesses to connect with one another. Networking events are held throughout the year. The website facilitates event registration and membership roles.

  1. Need to collect contact and business information from all members guests and attendees
  2. Members have acess to other member and guests information
  3. Guests may not view information about other members
  4. Guests need to be able to register for events.
  5. Members need to be able to register their guests for the events

Modules

Standard, Development, and UI Related:
CCK (Email, Embed GMap, File Field, Link, Imagefield, Phone) Admin Menu, Backup Migrate, Block Edit, Captcha, Devel, FCKEditor, Image Cache, Image API, IMCE, Pathauto, Pathfilter, Token, Views, Views Bulk operations, Views Export xls, Webform, Follow, Calendar, Date, Equal Heights

Registration Related:
Signup & Signup Restrict By Role - Allows users to sign up for nodes.
Content Profile - CCK fields tied to users
Auto Node Title - When you use Content Profile the username is your primary key so there's no real need for a Drupal's Default Title field. This module hides the title field from the user and automatically generates one. You can then create CCK fields for First Name and Last Name if you wish. This module is also useful when creating a node that consists only of images.
Login Toboggan - allows users to log in with email address, two email fields on registration
Protect Critical Users - keeps admins from deleting themselves or User 1
User Selectable Roles - In this case we wanted users to have the option of choosing "Member" or "Guest" on registration.
Role Delegation - Also needed to allow admins to promote and demote certain users at anytime.
Content access - Creates the ability to grant permissions based on content type. In this case I want guests to be able to view and edit their profiles but no one elses
Field Permissions - Creates ability to grant permissions based on field. In this case we wanted to make sure only administrators has access to users email addresses and other personal information.

Signup

How to use the Signup Module

  1. Download, unpack, and install the module in the usual Drupal way.
  2. Configure SignUp defaults at Administer > Site configuration > Signup
  3. Enable SignUp on the Content Type that you want to have the SignUp at Administer > Content management > Content types
  4. Create the Node that you want people to sign up for
  5. Click Edit to configure that node's Signup behavior.

Why Drupal's Signup module is awesome:

  • Views Integration
  • Signup lists appear on the Node bottom or on the tab depending on your preference
  • You can easily mark attendance
  • You can close signups at a certain time or at a certain number of registrants
  • You can restricting sign up by role (using that module) or , versatile - can change locations, sends remineder emails to users
  • Doesn't have to be used for event registration, could also be used to form committees
  • Sends Automatic Emails to all that signed up

How Drupal's SignUp module falls short:

Using all the available modules that I'm aware of and doing everything you can (short of custom programming) to simplify the registration process, there is still a break between signup and site registration. A user expects to click "Signup", enter her information, and get a confirmation email and go about her day.

You could allow anonymous users to signup. This allows them to circumvent step one in the process However the client doesn't collect all the yummy Drupal-friendly information. That means no node references, no cool cck fields, no views integration (at least not in the same way). With a little php knowledge and intuition a person could add custom fields to the Signup form and that will help but it still falls short of what clients expect. Once they see all the cool stuff Drupal can do with registration, they don't understand why a user needs an account to leverage all that good data. They see it as taking away a feature, not adding one.

If you think you can conquer the Signup module and bridge the gap between site registration and event signup, feel free to post a comment or drop me a line.

Useful links:

How to add custom fields to the Signup form
Weight Module

***notes from July 14, 2010 presentation at San Diego's Drupal User's Group Meeting.