TOPIC: Need assistance with prerequisite events

Hi everyone:

I would like to better understand how prerequisite events work. It has been my understanding that a prerequisite event simply requires the user to have registered for a previous event that is specified in the backend. It has not been my understanding that a prerequisite event requires a login and a Joomla! account. If this is not the case, please let me know.

Requiring a login and Joomla! account does not seem to be in keeping with the overall philosophy of DT register. I have no prior experience with events requiring a Joomla! account so I do not understand why this would be the case here.

At present, I have two upcoming events. The first one has no prerequisites and is public. The second one is also public but has the first event as a prerequisite. There are going to be many people who will want to take the second event after registering for the first one but they do not have a Joomla! account and I really do not want to require them to have one.

All comments, feedback is appreciated.

Sincerely,
Howard

Hi everyone:

I just spent some time reading the DT register manual and I am seeing that in fact it is true that prerequisite events require a Joomla! login.

I must say that I do not understand the logic of this because it is not required for a person to have a login for the original required event. This is like saying that between the first event which is the prerequisite and the second event, the person is now required to create an account on the Joomla! website. Why require this? Is this because it is the only way to be able to check whether the person has satisfied the prerequisite?

Also, the software does not have any notification that says something like “you are attempting to register for an event for which there is a prerequisite. You need to create an account on the site in order to register for this event.

It makes sense to me that some kind of notification should be possible to give to the user so they understand what they are required to do and why. All comments appreciated.

Sincerely,
Howard

I don't use prerequisites so I may not be the most qualified person to comment. That said, I would think you would need to make both events private. How would you ever know if a person has registered for the prerequisite if it isn't stored in their account? There are other advantanges to private events, such as the ability for a user to view a history of the events they have registered for. Or making payments, changes or cancellations after the initial registration.

I guess I just don't see how you would ever verify if they registered for the first event if they didn't create an account before regsitering for the first event.

Hi Marc:

When someone registers for an event, public or private, they are recorded by DT Register for that event. Right?

This creates an event record for them even if they do not have a account on the Joomla site. It is true that I cannot look up their name say in CB and see a history but if I go to the records for the first event, I can see who registered and then later who attended. Another reason I don't have people register on the site for a free event is that all registration options involve a cost and a lot of the events we do are free.

I've decided to remove the formal prerequisite requirement and simply made it clear in the event article description. I'm going to see how this works and adjust later if needed. Hope this clarifies it.

Sincerely,
Howard

Howard, yes when using prerequisite events or prerequisite categories, this feature will make the event require login. This has ALWAYS been the case with this feature. It is also mentioned in the tooltips within the event setup... in our video tutorials... etc. As the logged in user has his registration records associated with the user account, this is how prereq events are checked. It checks to see WHO is logged in, then checks that user account to see if they've registered for the necessary prereq events or not. If you don't want to require login, then you won't be able to use that feature.

By the way, there IS a prerequisite notification message. It's on the messages tab in configuration. Whenever a user tries to register to an event and you do not meet the prerequisite requirements, you'll get the message that you have setup in configuration.

Howard,
I see your point, but there still needs to be a way to verify that they actually registered for the first event. Yes it is in the database, but what data would it use to verify this? Email address or a name or ? Then what if they use a different spelling of their name, or decide to use a different email address? I don't have the answer, I'm just thinking out loud because we have tried to determine if our events should all be public vs. private.

One thing that we considered which might be a consideration for you; Since your site membership costs money, could you create a subdomain for your event registrations, with a separate joomla install (events.mysite.com) Then you could allow registrations on this new site without worrying about giving them access to your main site. Is this inconvenient for your visitors? It shouldn't be. When we talked about it, we compared it to other websites... if someone purchases an item on amazon, or their favorite website, most sites require them to create an account first.

A good friend of mine once said, "This may not be a good idea, but it might lead to one."