Conferences and Events

Conferences and Events (CAE) provides a structured set of reusable Drupal entities for building conference, event, registration, attendance, lodging, transportation, and guest management systems.

CAE is designed as a foundation for organizations that manage conferences, camps, meetings, and other events with complex relationships between people, groups, schedules, facilities, registrations, and event operations.

Rather than storing all event information in content types or building a separate data model for each event, CAE provides dedicated, fieldable entity types that integrate with Drupal's entity and field systems. Site builders can extend these entities with custom fields, configure their forms and displays, build Views, and use them as the foundation for custom workflows and applications.

Features

CAE provides custom Drupal entity types representing common information used by conference and event management systems.

The project includes entities for:

• Conferences
• Groups and group members
• People
• Events
• Volunteers
• Camps
• Churches
• Partners
• Dorm assignments
• Seats and seat instances
• Badges
• Flights
• Area services
• Contacts
• Itineraries
• Questionnaires
• Absence requests and absence request templates
• Registration changes
• Scheduled shuttle times
• Seating layouts
• Schools
• Provisions
• Sponsors
• Campuses
• Attendance

These entities provide a common data model while allowing individual Drupal sites to determine how that data should be collected, displayed, related, and used.

CAE entities are designed to work with standard Drupal functionality, including:

• Field UI for adding site-specific fields.
• Entity reference fields for connecting related records.
• Views for building administrative listings, reports, schedules, directories, and other displays.
• Drupal's form and display configuration systems.
• Entity permissions and access control.
• Bundles where different variations of an entity are needed.

For example, a conference can contain scheduled events; people can participate through groups and group memberships; events can track attendance; guests can have itineraries, flights, transportation, lodging, and provisions; and physical seating can be represented through seating layouts, seats, conference-specific seat instances, and badges.

CAE is useful when an organization's event requirements have grown beyond a simple Event content type and need a reusable relational data model for managing the many records involved in operating conferences and events.

Potential use cases include conferences, conventions, camps, retreats, church events, educational events, training events, multi-session meetings, guest and speaker management, volunteer coordination, transportation planning, lodging assignments, reserved seating, attendance tracking, and registration administration.

Post-Installation

After enabling CAE, the module adds its entity types and their administrative interfaces to Drupal.

CAE should be considered a foundation rather than a preconfigured event website. Site builders can configure the provided entity types using Drupal's normal entity, field, form display, and view display tools.

A typical implementation begins by creating or configuring the entities needed for the site's workflow. For example, a site might create a Conference, add Events to its schedule, create Groups for different types of participants, and associate Group Members with those groups.

Additional entities can then be used as required. A conference managing overnight guests might use dorm assignments, flights, scheduled shuttle times, itineraries, and provisions, while an event with reserved seating might use seating layouts, seats, seat instances, and badges.

Not every CAE entity is required for every implementation. Sites can use the portions of the data model appropriate for their event-management requirements and extend those entities with their own fields.

Because CAE uses Drupal entities, site builders can use Views and other entity-aware Drupal modules to create custom administrative interfaces, reports, schedules, exports, dashboards, and workflows.

Additional Requirements

CAE requires Drupal core.

Individual CAE components may have additional contributed-module dependencies depending on the functionality they provide. These dependencies are declared by the applicable module or submodule so that Drupal and Composer can install the required components.

Sites implementing registration, payments, complex addresses, or other functionality outside CAE's core data model may require additional contributed modules.

Recommended modules/libraries

The following Drupal projects can complement CAE depending on the site's requirements:

• Views Bulk Operations for performing administrative operations on multiple records.
• Inline Entity Form for managing referenced entities within other entity forms.
• Address for structured international postal addresses.
• Drupal Commerce when conferences or events require paid registrations, products, orders, or payments.

These projects are not necessarily required by CAE itself and should be installed only when their functionality is needed.

Similar projects

Drupal provides several contributed projects for individual aspects of event management, including registration, groups, calendars, commerce, and attendance-related workflows.

CAE differs by providing a broader, interconnected entity model intended to represent the operational data surrounding conferences and events. Instead of focusing exclusively on event registration or calendar display, CAE provides entities for people, groups, schedules, attendance, lodging, transportation, seating, guests, volunteers, sponsors, and other related records.

CAE can also be used alongside specialized contributed modules. Its purpose is to provide the underlying conference and event data model while allowing other Drupal modules to provide specialized workflows where appropriate.

Supporting this Module

Bug reports, feature requests, patches, and other contributions are welcome through the project's Drupal.org issue queue.

Community contributions that improve the project's entity model, documentation, integrations, automated tests, and compatibility with current Drupal releases are welcome.

Community Documentation

Documentation and examples will be added as the project develops.

The project's Drupal.org documentation and issue queue should be used for information about installation, configuration, entity relationships, and development with CAE.

Architecture

CAE is designed around Drupal's entity system. Conference and event information is stored as structured entities rather than being tied to a particular theme, page layout, registration form, or administrative workflow.

This approach allows CAE to serve as a reusable foundation for both traditional Drupal websites and custom applications built on Drupal. Developers can query CAE entities through Drupal's Entity API, respond to entity events and hooks, build custom forms and workflows, expose data through APIs, and integrate the data model with other Drupal modules.

The project is intentionally modular. Organizations can build relatively simple event-management systems using only a few CAE entities or use the broader entity model to support complex, multi-event conference operations.