Generously funded by Zing, Civicon London will see the launch of new functionality enabling Civi to handle recurring events and much more. Rather than being restricted to ‘one-off’ events, Civi will now handle far more complex scenarios.
The new features will be incorporated into the core of CiviEvent but there are added bonuses as the recurring functionality has wide-ranging applications within Civi. Do you want to schedule volunteers every Tuesday at 4pm and on the third Friday of every month? Do you need to make a room booking every Monday evening for 6 weeks, three times a year? In time, the recurring functionality should make this possible in extensions such as CiviVolunteer and CiviBooki
Back to Events, Civi will now be able to deal with:
1. Events with multiple sessions - An event such as a training course with several sessions and a defined start and finish date. It may last for 10 weeks but a participant registers once (either at the start or as the course progresses).
2. Repeating Events - The same event that repeats on several occasions eg a one day training event repeated monthly. Different people sign up for different dates.
3. Recurring Events - An ongoing event eg a regular class or group. Set it up once and it can either run ad infinitum (eg youth club every week of the year) or you can block out weeks when it doesn't run (eg no debating group in the school holidays).
Users will have the ability to:
• Create events/courses that run for several weeks/months but require just one registration
• Alter session times and insert breaks for holidays etc
• Re-use schedules
• Assign participants at any stage
• Record and report on attendance
The screenshot below shows some work in progress.
Working for Woodlands Church in the UK, this new development will open up lots of possibilities for us. We'll be able to handle our termly 9 week Alpha Course, bi-annual Marriage Course, weekly youth club and much more. When recurring functionality is added to CiviVolunteer we could start to use it for the hundreds of volunteers who serve week by week on different 'recurring' teams and a recurring element in CiviBooking could handle our regular, ongoing room bookings. Many Civi users will have their own use cases - scheduling clubs, classes, courses, groups and more.
If you’d like to read more about Recurring Events, please check out the Wiki's implementation plan and make comments either here or on the Wiki. I can be contacted on lindsey.mansfield@
Comments
Lindsey, this is great news! Thanks so much for spearheading it and for your part in providing a much-needed component to Civi. As the tech lead at a church here in the States, this has far reaching implications for the way we use Civi.
Thanks, that's good to hear. Do email me at some point. I'd be interested in chatting abut how you're currently using Civi to see if there's other functionality we can share church-wise. You might particularly be interested in the work we've done to enable us to record attendance for our mid-week groups. We could perhaps Skype/screenshare.
This sounds fantastic! A huge thanks to Zing for funding this project. I have some questions about how this will work, which I added to the wiki page at: http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/Recurring+Events%3A+Implementation+Plan
Many of the organizations I work with are religious congregations, and would love to be part of a skype/screen share/Google Hangout about congregation-specific uses of CiviCRM.
Well done, Lindsay. I know you've been working toward this for a while now. Hope to see this live soon!
Ken
Lindsay,
How do you envisage recurring CiviEvents will be released?
Ken
This is currently scheduled for the 4.6 release
Would the ability to select multiple conference sessions be included? For example, you register for Conference and need to select AM and PM sessions for each day of the 3-day conference. In the past I've had to do this with complex price sets so that we can keep count of the number of participants in each session. I had hoped to use shopping cart checkout to simplify the attendee's experience, but that feature is not functional in Joomla.
Hi penguintrax. Can I encourage you to put your question on https://civicrm.org/blogs/deepaksrivastava/core-recursion-recurring-events-engine as Deepak and the VEDA team are dealing with the specifics of the functionality and could respond there. Thanks.