ZenCart for Classes, Membship Option or Product?

Hi! I'm quite impressed with ZenCart, and am in the middle of updating a site for a non-profit that offers a variety of sailing classes to the local community.

One of the very compelling things about using Zen cart is that by using the stock management features, we can see when the class fills up (many classes only take 4 students, so it's important to be quick and accurate about available spots.)

Generally it's working great, but I have a few tweaks I'd like to make before I go live, and I could use some fedback on the best way to implement them.

1.) Membership is required for taking classes.

I have created a Category, "Membership" that allows folks to select a membership level (Individual, Family, or Student/Senior). Each membership level is just a product.

The problem is that if a new person wants to sign up for a class, it says in the description of the class that they must be a member to take the class, so they have to navigate away from the class they are signing up from, and then go to the "Membership" category, and select a membership.

I would rather just have a button or a few buttons to let them add the membership to their cart and stay on the current page . Is that possible?

I'm looking at both the cross sell module, and just setting up "options" for all course sign ups - "Add Membership", and then they can select the appropriate membership level. For the office, it would be easier to track the memberships as separate prodcuts, but it seems like making it an optional choice during sign up is better for the customer.

My current thought is to somehow add a button to the shopping cart display (includes/languages/english/shopping_cart.php) so that they can select a memberhip to add to their cart right there, when they are checking out.

To the expereinced Zenners - How would you do it?

2.) The other thing that I'd really like to figure out is how to send a CUSTOMIZED e-mail to somone after they have signed up for a class. This would be a big help in reducing the adminstrative work for our organization. When someone signs up for a class, we send an e-mail that includes details, a medical/liability waiver, etc. For some classes, we also send by mail the books that they need for the class. Is there a way to modify the outgoing order confirmation to include specific information, based on the product they bought? (In our case, the class or workshop they signed up for.)

Thanks!

Tom

I would rather just have a button or a few buttons to let them add the membership to their cart and stay on the current page . Is that possible?

Add the various membership levels as Attributes of your Class Product.

Is there a way to modify the outgoing order confirmation to include specific information, based on the product they bought? (In our case, the class or workshop they signed up for.)

This would take some custom coding as it is not available in a stock install.