You must set one organizer for each seminar. In addition, you can set one or more speakers and one or more seminar sites (real places this time) for a seminar. If you want to enter a seminar with an organizer, speakers or seminar sites that haven't been entered into the database yet, it's a good idea to enter those first before entering the seminar.
Entering and managing organizers
At the beginning, you can should some basic records. Usually, the users who organize and manage the seminars don't need to alter these records any more, so it would be a good idea to store them in a system folder which most back-end users cannot write to.
Add one or more organizer records to the page that will hold the organizer records.
An organizer record will hold the basic information about the person (or the team) who organizes a seminar. Note that the organizer doesn't need to be the same as the speaker (and usually isn't the same). Instead, the organizer is the person who reserves the seminar site, collects the fee, manages the registrations and so on.
An organizer record contains the following fields:
name (required), will be shown on the front end
homepage URL including the http://, will be shown on the front end
e-mail address (required, must be valid), notifications of new registrations will be sent to this address, this address will be used as From: address for the confirmation e-mails when someone registers for a workshop, will not be shown on the front end
footer text that will be put at the end of the confirmation e-mails when someone registers for a workshop, will not be shown on the front end (this field is not required, but it is highly recommended to fill it in with some nice words to the users who have just signed up for one of your events)
Please note that version prior to 0.4.0 of this extension hadn't marked the field email as required. If you have organizer records from that version, please check that all organizer records have a valid e-mail address set. If there is no e-mail address, online registration will fail with an error 500.
If you intend to manage payments and you would like to records which method of payment has been used, you can enter records for those. They include the following fields:
title (required)
detailed description (will be included in the confirmation e-mail on registration)
Entering and managing speakers
On the system folder that should contain the speaker records, you can create speaker records.
The following fields are public and will be displayed on the front end:
name (required)
the speaker's organization or company
homepage URL, including the http://
description (you can use HTML in this field)
The following fields are for your internal purposes only and don't get displayed on the front end:
internal notes
address
private phone number
work phone number
mobile phone number
fax number
e-mail address
Entering and managing seminar sites
The following fields are public and will be displayed on the front end:
title (required)
address (you can use HTML in this field)
homepage URL, including the http://
directions (you can use HTML in this field)
The field “internal notes” is only for your internal use and doesn't get displayed on the front end.
Note that in a seminar record, you can add a room number in addition to the general seminar site(s).
Entering and managing seminars
You can add the seminar records to the page(s) that should contain these records. Note that you have to add those pages as the DB starting point when adding a Seminar Manager content elements or the seminars won't get listed.
You can enter the following data for a seminar, which will be used for the front end:
hide the seminar (default: disabled)
when to display the seminar in the front end (don't confuse this with the hours when the seminars take place, only enable this excludefield for users who are not apt to get these fields mixed)
title (required) (don't use HTML in this field)
subtitle
description (you can use HTML in this field)
accreditation number according to the Akkreditierungsverordnung Hessen (excludefield)
number of credit points (excludefield)
first seminar day and the beginning time in the format hh:mm dd-mm-yyyy, semi-required (events without a start day technically are considered to be sometime in the future)
last seminar day and the closing time in the format hh:mm dd-mm-yyyy (if you have an open-ended event, just leave this field empty)
registration deadline in the format hh:mm dd-mm-yyyy (Set this date if users shouldn't be allowed to register for this event after this date/time. If not set, the seminar starting time will be the deadline instead.) Please enter a date/time smaller than the starting time.
the site(s) where the seminar takes place, select one or more sites from the database (not required), when the seminar takes place on different sites, add to the description which site will be used on which day
room number (if the seminar site has more than one room or the room is hard to find)
speaker(s), select one or more speakers from the database (not required)
default price, without the currency name
special price (will only get displayed if it is not 0), without the currency name
allowed payment methods for this seminar (they will be listed in the details page and in the confirmation e-mail to the attendee, so you must set at least the allowed payment methods if you want to have them to be mentioned via e-mail to the attendees)
organizer(s), select one or more organizers from the database (required). Please note that version prior to 0.4.1 of this extension hadn't marked the field organizer as required. If you have seminar records from that version, please check that all seminar records have one or more organizers set. If there is no organizer, online registration will fail with an error 500.
whether registration is required, checked by default
how many registration are necessary for the seminar to be full enough to take place
the maximal number of registrations before the seminar is completely full (for seminars that require registration, you must in this field)
Note that the beginning and end date/time include both the date of the first and last day as well as the seminar times. If the seminar times are different on some days, please add a little note to the seminar description. (For a later version of this extension, it is planned to have allow for different time slots on different days.)
If you don't know the seminar hours yet, enter 00:00 as starting and closing time. If the event is open-ended, just leave the end date/time field empty.
In addition, you can put internal notes into the seminar record. The internal notes don't get published on the front end.
The following fields are automatically calculated (at the moment, they are not updated automatically when manually entering or deleting a registration; go to Web > Seminars > Update statistics to manually all of them xxx):
current number of registrations, including unpaid registrations
whether the seminar already has enough registrations to take place
whether the seminar is full
The following fields can be searched using the search box in the list view:
title
subtitle
description
accreditation number
Canceling events
In case the speaker is ill or there are not enough registrations, you can mark an event as canceled by checking “Has been canceled” in the seminar record. This will mark the event as canceled in the front end (the default style in the list view is stricken through plus a message in the single view). You still need to manually notify and refund the attendees who have registered so far.
When a logged-in front-end user registers for a seminar, the following happens:
It is checked whether it still is possible to register for that seminar and the user still hasn't registered for that seminar yet.
The user can enter some information about their attendance, e.g. special interests, previous knowledge about the seminar subject, lodging or food preferences. This can be configured via plugin.tx_seminars_pi1.showRegistrationFields.
An attendance record is entered into the database (into the page configured via plugin.tx_seminars.attendancesPID), making the connection between this front-end user and the corresponding seminar. The statistics for that seminar are immediately updated in the back end and front end, preventing overbooked seminars.
A thank-you e-mail is sent to the front-end user using the first organizer of that seminar record as From: address and that organizer's e-mail footer.
A notification e-mail is sent to that seminar's organizers (all of them, not just the first), using the attendee's e-mail address as From: address.
Additional notification emails are sent if the event reaches the minimum limit of registrations to be held, or if the event gets fully booked. These notifications go to all organizers of this event, the first organizer's e-mail address is used as sender.These mails will only be sent, if they are activated in the TypoScript setup. By default, the mails will be sent.
A thank-you message is displayed to the user.
Displaying the seminar and registration statistics and details
You can find your seminars using Web > Lists in the folder where you've created them. To just learn the number of registered participants and whether the seminar has enough attendees or is already full, you can use the info button or just the set fields function to have those fields listed:
For getting a list of participants for a seminar, full-blown back-end report functions are planned for later versions of this extension. (If you need this feature, you can pay for the author's time so that this feature becomes reality.) For the moment, you have three ways of using slim versions of the report function:
- In Web > Seminars > Show event details, you can get a list of the participant names and e-mail addresses for each seminar in the selected page, ready for copy and paste into your e-mail client. There are three lists for each seminar: All participants, those who have paid and those who haven't (in case you want to send them a reminder):
- In Web > Seminars > Update statistics: Here you can display the raw numbers as well as the registrations (including the name, login name and UID of the front-end users who have signed up for your seminars):
- In Web > Lists, you can enter the folder where the attendances have been stored automatically (specified using plugin.tx_seminars.attendancesPID) and select the column you'd like to see using the set fields function. (You'll probably want to sort by the seminar ID.) Please note that in the list view relations to other database tables (seminar sites, organizers, speakers, payment methods) get displayed as numbers instead of as their titles. In future versions of this extension this will look nicer.If you want to view the details for a registration record (eg. what the user has entered into the registration form), you can use the edit function for each record. This will also be a lot more comfortable in later versions of this extension.
In addition, you can use the front-end registration lists.
Changing, deleting and entering registrations
You can edit, delete and enter registration records using Web > Lists. If you have manually added or deleted a registration record, you need to update the seminar statistics using Web > Seminars > Update statistics so that the seminar statistics on the front end and back end are consistent again.
Entering payments
You can also use this extension to record payments from participants for their seminar. If you have received a payment (be in in cash, bank transfer, credit card or whatever), edit the corresponding registration record and fill in the following fields:
Has paid: Note that this field will go away soon. Instead, if someone has paid will be deducted by whether a payment date has been entered. So make sure to set a payment date for all attendances that have been paid.
Date of payment (if this field is set, an attendance is considered as paid, so always enter the date when you enter a payment)
Method of payment (optional, use it if you like to track this)
Tracking who has attended a seminar and who hasn't
If you want to record who has attended a seminar and who hasn't (eg. for certificates), you can edit the corresponding registration record and fill in this field:
Has attended
Changing a registration from one event to another
Please don't do this. This might mess up the statistics.
Instead, delete the old registration and have the participant sign up for the other event.
If you would like to link to the detailed description for a seminar (from other seminar descriptions or from any other page), you can use this format:
<URL of seminar listing page>?tx_seminars_pi1[showUid]=<UID of the seminar>
For example, if the URL of the seminar listing page is http://www.casebo.de/casebo-workshops.html and you would like to the seminar with the UID 27, the complete URL to that seminar would be this:
http://www.casebo.de/casebo-workshops.html?tx_seminars_pi1[showUid]=27
(In the links from the list view, the URLs contain an addition ampersand after the question mark, but that can be ignored.)
