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Hi all, hope you’re all well.
Long-time lurker, previous visitor but I’ve forgotten all my login information so I’ve returned under new guise.
But here goes…
I’ve been asked to develop a website for a startup company, and I’m unsure which way to go with it – so I’m here for some advice/guidance and, hopefully, someone might give me a lightbulb moment. So here goes…
The company will be providing child karate lessons at a number of locations. Each location will provide a number of classes at different times, based on the age of those taking part.
They’d like parents to be able to view the class times online, and ‘book a slot’ if available (each class has a maximum number of participants), which will involve capturing the relevant details i.e. contact information. There will be no online payment facility for the time being, but is something that should be factored into consideration for future scope.
They’d also like the backend to provide a number of reports that can be printed/ran ad-hoc, including:
– Class registers
– Attendance figures for each class/location/age group etc
– Monitoring who has paid/who is due to pay etc (payment information will be entered manually until demand is there for online payments)
– Lists of registrants, source of ‘lead’ and also waiting lists for classes
Solution 1:
Now, my initial thoughts were to construct the website on WordPress (at their request) to enable them to manage the content at will, and have the ‘admin backend’ side of things running on a separate database and separate URL, probably using PHP and MySQL.
Solution 2:
The alternative would be to develop a plugin for the WordPress install, that enables them to manage all of the admin side of things.
My questions from the above are…
Does anyone know of any off-the-shelf solution that could be customised? (I’ve had a look, but can’t really find anything)
What solution would you propose?
Are there any issues with pushing all data collated through a WordPress-based form into an external database?
Any potential pitfalls I should be aware of!?
Thanks in advance for your help/suggestions/advice!