While working this website and planning our next meeting, Ray mentioned that we really needed a form on this website so we could get members to register their attendance. The concern was that attendences at our meeting have been rapidly growing and the seating capacity at our venue is limited to 24. Despite my very limited knowledge on creating forms I said “no problem.” I then googled event registration form and I found the plug-in I needed to and promptly installed it.
It took a little bit of time to get the hang of it but essentially I’ve done it. The plug-in I found was called Event Registration. Its a nifty little tool and it is also free. The plug-in is quite good and could be great to use if you were holding an event that you wanted people to register to. It even integrates with PayPal so if you wanted to charge for your event you could. This could be especially useful for any niches you might be interested in promoting. The good news is that the plug-in also has the flexibility to allow you to register people for free. This was great news for me as since the venue at our next two meetings does not cost anything.
The only tricky thing was working out how to display the registration form. In any case I had to create a new page, find the html code for the form and then paste it into the html tab of the page I had just created. Once this was done, my form was ready to go.
The only downside to the plugin is:
- You need to register your name, address and phone number. There does not seem to be any way of changing this within the plug-in.
- It does not integrate with your autoresponder account
- The email comes directly from my web-hosting account so it is not the email address I normally use. It looks weird and a little like spam as it displays my hostaccountname@box441.bluehost.com. I have not found a way to customise the email address.
The plug-in therefore is limited in some respects. Now I can see that if you were holding an event that you suddenly had to cancel or there was a change of venue this would be useful. However, if you were holding an event like we are doing this could be a right royal pain. Some people may not want to give out their personal details – they might just want to attend. For our purposes, I just want to register Melpies members to our meeting as the room only holds 24 people. Given we had about 14 or 15 people at our last meeting and the numbers have been rapidly growing we needed to know how many people were coming.
So apologies in advance for those who register – I really don’t want your address and contact details but the plugin itself makes it compulsory to put the details in. The good news however is that we have a registration form.
This is just another reason why I am so in love with WordPress. There are so many plug-ins that I really can’t see why anyone would need to spend any money on having a website built for them. There is just about a plug-in for everything imaginable.
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