Registration Manager

Logical Developers LLC
New York, NY USA

The Registration Manager application, hosted by Logical Developers, was created for the The National Coalition of Single-Sex Public Schools (NCSSPS). It is used to manage enrollment to the annual NCSSPS conference. NCSSPS is a not-for-profit group that advocates for the implementation of single-sex public schools.

Registration Manager is comprised of three Iron Speed Designer applications:

	Logical CMS for ASP.NET — A content management system that populates content on NCSSPS's public website (http://www.ncssps.org).
	Conference Registration — A wizard-like application that collects registrant information to store and send to a merchant services website for processing.
	Registration Manager — Allows customers to track registrants, maintain contacts, and conduct email marketing campaigns with great ease. It is used by event coordinators who collect paid registrant information for the NCSSPS conference.

The application is accessed by conference registrants, marketing personal and event managers. Registrants login to the website and provide contact information, event date and payment method. The application provides a summary of this information and a total cost estimate. This estimate is based on a set of rules that accounts for eligible discounts. Registrants can pay with a check or credit card and may print a copy of their invoice. When registrants pay with a credit card, an ASP.NET script performs an HTTP post containing all the sales information to the merchant services provider. The transaction is processed and the merchant services company sends an HTTP post confirmation to our server and marks the user as paid.

The public website registration page: an Iron Speed Designer form made in the exact style of the website.

The marketing team uses the application to maintain content on the website and create, send and track targeted, personalized email marketing campaigns. There is a special section where users can populate a newsletter template with text and HTML assets without actually coding. The event manager logs in to proof and send newsletters, complete with merge variables (e.g. Dear FirstName) and serialized opt out links to the list of recipients.

The newsletter when previewed.

Application size and scope

The application accesses two Microsoft SQL Server databases comprised of 29 tables and six database views. The primary registration database is used in conjunction with a database that is populated by the email server software. This allows the email campaign management portion of the application to track bounced emails.

Previous campaigns can be analyzed. Email bounces are tracked.

The application contains approximately 105 web pages; 20 are devoted to registration management and five are accessible to registrants through the website.

The project

This application began as an experiment. We wanted to learn how to customize the look and feel of an Iron Speed Designer-generated application. Furthermore, we wanted to use the application to create a public website that leveraged Iron Speed Designer's form and validation abilities. We are consequently convinced of its efficacy, even in the use of small, minimal page applications.

Registration Manager took me four person-weeks to implement, with a little help from my graphic designer. The majority of my development time was spent writing code customizations but, thanks to my familiarity to ASP.NET coding within Iron Speed applications, it took me no more time than it would have had I been developing such a subroutine for any ASP.NET application.

The content management application allows a non-technical user to update the content of the site.

The CMS portion was a complete breeze thanks to Iron Speed Designer and Logical CMS, which together let us build the CMS component in record time. The Registration Manager component, arguably the centerpiece, was developed in a matter of days using Iron Speed Designer.

Registrations are accessible via the Registration Manager.

Code extensions and customizations

Several code customizations were required for this component, but only for the three pages involved. We wrote 350 lines of custom code to extend Registration Manager and 260 lines for the public website.

Obviously, no code customizations were needed for the CMS portion of development — that had all been developed earlier. Registration Manager, the main component, required only a few pages of customizations. The primary customization was the email campaign execution pages. These pages, although created in Iron Speed Designer, contained ASP.NET functions and subroutines that allowed the final step to the execution of email campaigns to take place.

Email campaigns are created allowing recipients to be added.

Page layout customizations

We created an application-specific design theme for the publicly-accessible registration application. (http://www.ncssps.org/register)

Iron Speed Designer impact

We saved one person-month of development time and over $3,000 using Iron Speed Designer. Without Iron Speed Designer, the project would have taken twice as long and would not have been feasible based on the client's budget.

Next steps

We plan to sell Registration Manager as an affordable event management solution.

About the developer

Paul Modiano has been working in software development and IT for over 18 years. As the former CTO of UpdateThis.com Inc., he has spent 12 years managing software projects. He is currently the President of Logical Developers LLC, a web application development company and application service provider.