Is there free software I can use to do camp registration online?

March 5, 2011 1:43 PM

What is the best way to do online camp registration? Ideally I'd like to use free and/or open source software that I can host on my own server. Is there something like a Wordpress for camp registrations? Or maybe something like conference registration?

I'm familiar with programming basics, HTML/CSS/PHP/Javascript/MySQL, so I don't really mind modifying an existing piece of software to do what I want.

Basically, I'd like a system that allows parents to both select what weeks they'd like to attend the camp, and pay for them. The other part of the registration process involves filling out forms with the child's preferences for specific programs within those weeks, and we want those to eventually be acessible as a spreadsheet (I'm assuming exporting from MySQL or something).

This would be a big project for me to code from scratch, simply because of the two-part shopping cart + giving information system that I need. So does anyone have any suggestions of something that does something close to what I want that I could modify? Or something that just does what I want?

Thanks so much in advance!

posted by ejfox to computers & internet (3 answers total)

The easy way to do this would probably be set up forms on wufoo and then send the registrants on to paypal from there, with a payment amount set based on their form input. No coding or hosting at your end. As it happens, I recently registered for an event that used exactly this setup.
posted by adamrice at 2:12 PM on March 5, 2011

I know people that have used google docs -> forms as the RSVP card for their weddings. It is like REALLY easy to make new forms and you can have as many questions as you need it to. From there you'll have to do something about payment, probably paypal or something like that.
posted by magnetsphere at 2:52 PM on March 5, 2011

Google Spreadsheets would be a good way to collect the information. Please don't try to handle payment processing yourself. You want to push that responsibility to someone else. Google Checkout is fairly easy, and you could create a bunch of links into it for various quantities, i.e., 1 week, 2 weeks, etc., though they would need to be able to select the correct one.
posted by odinsdream at 3:33 PM on March 5, 2011