Logic to Sell Memberships for Children Using Ubercart and Drupal

Question

I'm sorry if this is not within the acceptable question guidelines for Stack Overflow, but I am feeling stumped, and I feel that what I'm trying to do might just be incredibly simple for some of the veterans here.

I've set up an Ubercart on a Drupal installation for a small gym website. What they are wanting is to allow a customer to register and pay for various memberships for their children (youth flag football, teeball, etc.). One person may come back and sign up multiple times throughout the year, and each customer may have multiple children who can each participate in multiple programs.

What I'm thinking is to disable anonymous checkout on Ubercart. The customer billing address will be the saved information for the "parent." I'm thinking that the parents could create Members (their children) which could be stored in a content type called Members and the Members could be linked to the programs of which they are a member via entity reference. The children could maintain their relationship to their parents by authorship.

I've been trying to work through this for the last few hours. Does anyone know of a way the I can accomplish this--maybe with rules? I'm thinking some kind of credit system in which for each quantity of a membership (per program) that they pay for, they get one "credit" to create one entity reference between a member and a program.

Any brainstorming and help on this topic would be majorly appreciated. Thanks.

Answer 1

Your use case sounds more like event registration than selling memberships. Each class would be an event that parents would register their children for. It may seem like overkill here, but I would use something like CiviCRM or RedHen CRM for this. Both support the concept of relationships between members and provide event management tools. You could make each class an event that people would sign up for, pay (they could even register multiple children at the same time) and get a receipt. The event history information would be stored so parents could sign in and see what each child has done. You could even make the list of kids in the class public so parents could see who else is in the class.

Afterward, it would be easy to put together a survey to send to the "attendees" to get feedback on the event/class and notify them about future events. I can think of a dozen different things that these systems cover that you may need in the future (early bird event registration, special pricing for returning parents/children, activity reports to email to parents every year so they can see what their children did...).

You may be able to pull together modules and custom content types (Ubercart Event Registration module as a starting point), but a CRM would provide the things you are looking for now, and the features your customer will be asking for in the future.