I've been working for the past few months with CiviCRM and despite the differences which came as a bit of a culture-shock to me, I've cobbled together a few ideas for things that perhaps could be considered for future versions.

Please bear in mind that these are simply things that I have had to add myself for a live contract and in no way reflects poorly on the CiviCRM system as it stands. On the contrary, I think the fundamental aspects of CiviCRM offer an easy way to add crm functionality to your site.

I've added these features by several different methods such as using a custom version of the core code and adding a few dupal modules.

Event Owners
Simply put, the events need to have an owner/maintainer that can have information emailed to them or available on their dashboard to keep them appraised of how the event is progressing.

Event Budgets
My client uses heaps of different systems to organise an event. Not only are there tickets to consider but an event also needs various other financial information recording. For instance; speakers, food & drink, programmes. While the information is simply figure and no transaction is taking place on the site, you can then see income and expenses on one page and see if you are breaking even or better.

Now my Budget pages break the events costs down and give me an overview of attendance, income, expenditure and balance, invoice numbers and suppliers. Once I have this data I can then give my client a breakdown of costs throughout the year.

Free places based on membership
Basically, what do you get as a perk for being a member? How about free entrance to events. Simple, or rather not quite. I've added a membership for organisations that cascades to individuals and on top of that, the admin gets to choose how many places they get.

ACL based on membership
Some events only need to be available to members but I had to add the cascading membership mentioned above.

Delegate Badges and Event Register
Simply put, some events need those lovely 'what do I look like?' badges and also a register to tick people off as they arrive. Then information which may be helpful on the night added to the register like dietary requirements.

As with my last post. Please let me know what you think. There's a whole heap of things that can be added that would add more bloat than usefulness which is why I've stuck to the requests of my client and my solutions so far.

EDIT: I'm having some trouble at the moment. If anyone can help with how I count the free places. I had a system that worked but I now have to change it. Any help will be gratefully received. Please see my form post: http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,6519.0.html