CanadiansHistory
I have been doing registration for the Southern Ontario Orchid Society show for a couple of years. That show boasted over 800 entries. The old system had people comeing to us with their lists of plants scralled on coffee and dirt stained scraps of paper. The data entry was crushing. Printing the tags and the judging forms would take until the wee hours in the morning. More than once I was leaving as the judges were coming in to judge the show (7:00am). There had to be a better way. After much research, I deteremined that a powerful system could be build as a data driven wep app. This is the result.
In 2007 the first version of the online system was used for the SOOS show. 40% of the plants were pre-registered. It was felt that this was a huge sucess as it cut our workload almost in half. Exhibitors were impressed by having their plant tags ready for them when they arrived at the hall.
The original system was a split system. Pre-registration was done on-line and registration during set-up was done in a MS Access database. This was because we did not have a stable internet access at the hall. It required me to download all the data from the MySQL database on the website and import it into the MS Access database. The potential for disaster was not small. We lost a few plants in the translation, but not too many.
The version currently in Beta testing (2013) is a fully "online" system. All the reporting is done online and the results are available in real time to a publically accessable page.
See It In Action! Click on "Sample Show"
Login as an Exhibitor. Name: Guest, Password: Guest
Login as a Registrar: Name: TestReg, Password: TestReg