Howdies, dear Zen Cart Gurus and other smart people!

I will be trying to adapt my current ZC installation if possible to handle registrations for events. Something I've mentioned before during my many months of haunting these boards.

My demo sand-box is here:
http://register.coreknowledge.org

See the Registration category. (notice custom product type, "document_registration", of my own doing... although it has no special features yet.)

I did find this very interesting thread by Dr. Byte, but as it dates back to 2004 I'm uncertain about how well it will work with the current ZC version.

http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=4855

I will be showing this demo to the conference director and I anticipate these additional requirements, and I'd like your input and suggestions about how these information requirements can be handled.

1) Registrants for conferences often have to provide more information than someone simply making a purchase. But we don't want to bother our regular bookstore customers. So, creating more fields for account creation is not desirable. Yet, we need more information at the time of registration. How could this be handled?

Obviously, one can make a separate registration-only ZC site, and clutter up Account creation with all the data fields you like, but that's hardly elegant. Customers don't like having two login identities. I'd like to keep it all together.

2) Notice that there should be group registration possible. This means a special case of collecting even more information in a form, because while only one person is paying, a lot of individuals need to be recorded. I have seen dynamic forms that will add in as many rows as requested, directly on the same page, do you think that would work in ZC? Of course that needs to be recorded in a new database table for group registrants, keyed to the single transaction.

3) There needs to be a simple output so I can download registrations. Yeah, could possibly do in phpMyAdmin but not so easy with joined tables. It's not a simple table and range output.

I've told the conference director that such features will require hiring of custom coders, me being incompetent, and she says there's no budget (ha!).

So I'm looking for creative, resourceful ideas, but also greater clarity about the limits of what can be done with ZC code as it stands.

I'd like to collect some ideas about implementations before putting out a request for bids as a consulting project.

---Diana