Event listings and registration with Seminar

Recently a client asked me to include an event calendar and registration component into their Joomla website. After hunting around and looking at the usual suspects, I came across Seminar by Dirk Volmar.

Firstly, this component does not include online payment options. If you want people to pay online you’ll need a different solution. In our client’s case, most events are free but still require registration, and in this scenario Seminar does a great job. You can, of course, accept offline payments.

When you go to the Seminar website you’ll notice that it is in German. I can only speak a little German (Ich verstehe nicht!) but Google translate does an adequate job so you can navigate around.

The two key downloads are:

• the Seminar component, which is used to manage and display your events
• the Seminar module, which is used to display a small calendar, a summary list of events and event statistics.

These come in various languages, so make sure you download the correct one.

The Seminar component

The Seminar component is divided into five sections:

Settings – Here you configure the global settings for Seminar and how events are handled. It includes parameters to specify who can register for events, how notifications are sent, a Google Maps API Key and the like.

Categories – Events are grouped into categories for searching and sorting purposes. Here you add your categories and subsequently assign your events to them.

Templates – If you are going to be holding regular events, then use templates. As the name implies, you create a template for an event, so when you create a new event most of the details are filled in for you.

Events – This is the guts of the Seminar component. You create your events by entering the required data or selecting a template. Event fields include things like an event name, description, start and end dates and the maximum number of participants. For each event you can create custom fields used for visitor registration. For example, some events may only need first name, last name and an email address for registration, while others may require a contact phone number and company name. These can be added on a per event basis.

Statistics – One of the standout features of Seminar is the event statistics it provides. Grouped by month, Seminar displays the number of events, hits, bookings and other useful statistics in both tabular and graphical format.

The Seminar module

The Seminar module comes in three flavours: a small calendar, a summary list of events and event statistics.

If you want to provide your visitors with a snapshot of what’s happening in the current month then the small calendar is perfect. Days where events occur are highlighted and you roll the mouse over that date to display a summary of the event. You can also change the calendar colour scheme from the administration interface so you don’t have to mess around with CSS.

Next we have a summary list of events. Like a latest news module, you can display a summary of either all or upcoming events, either as a static or animated list. The animation is created using the marquee HTML tag, which has good and bad points (see below).

The event statistics module includes a summary of the total hits, booked spaces, free spaces and the like for all, recent or old events. While this may not be globally appealing, it can be configured so that only administrators can see the statistics by setting the module access level to “Special”.

What’s the cost?

Seminar is FREE. The only concession you make is the inclusion of Dirk’s copyright notice at the bottom of the event listing. For a small donation you can receive a code to remove the copyright notice.

Areas for improvement

While I like what the Seminar extension has to offer, there are a few things that could be added or changed to make it even better.

• Replace the marquee tag with some script to animate the summary list of events. When other scripted elements on the page execute, the animation can become jerky and distracting. There is also a risk that the marquee tag will become obsolete.
• In the current version you can’t schedule regular events. So if you have regular monthly meetings, you should create a template and then create individual instances. Scheduled events would streamline this process and be a great addition.
• There are a couple of minor annoyances with the administration side. For example, when adding a new event, if you forget to enter a required field, you lose the date settings you may have already entered; the form does not maintain "state" consistently.
• Many of the settings are global and can’t be configured on a per event basis. This is limiting if you want to, for example, allow visitors to use the rating system for one event and not another.

Conclusion

While Seminar does have a few shortcomings, it is by far one of the better event registration components I have used. If you don’t need a payment gateway and you want something that's fairly easy to configure and use then you should definitely give seminar a go.

For more information visit http://seminar.vollmar.ws/.