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Step by Step – Create A New Registration Form

18 Apr, 2020 Registrations, Step-by-Step Guides

In this step-step-step guide, we create a registration form – comprising a new event and a new store – from scratch. You can use this guide if you are setting up your first event on Director, or else you are setting up entry for a brand new event that you haven’t held previously.

Create the Store

  1. Create a New Store: /Stores/My Stores -> Add New
    Select the Store Type of “Registration”. Take care choosing the Short Code as this is used in the URL to access your registration form. A suggested naming convention might be: for the 2019 Big City Marathon, set short code to “bigcitymarathon2019“.

Create the Event

  1. Create a New Property: /Setup/Propertys -> Add New
    Only do this if you have not already created one. Remember that you can have multiple Events associated with a single Property. Read more here.
  2. Create a New Event: /Registrations/My Events -> Add New
    Choose a name that uniquely identifies the event, such as “2019 Big City Marathon”. It is also helpful to begin the event name with the year/edition. In most cases, you will have one Event instance per year and it is safe to set the “Edition” to the year of the event; e.g. “2019”. Select the Store that you just created as the Associated Store.
  3. Setup the Event: /Registrations/Event Dashboard (you should already be on this page after Step 2)
    1. On the left side Info Pane, upload a new header image if you have one (1200×250 jpg)
    2. On the Event Details tab, select an e-ticket document (use the default document)
    3. On the Races tab, click the Add New button to add races within your event. For example, the Big City Marathon might have a 5K, 10K, 21K and 42K races. Complete as many details for each Race as you wish.
    4. Leave the Event Questions tab for now. If you want to add additional Questions to your entry form later, look for a step-by-step guide on this web site.
    5. Do you want Director to automatically issue Bib Numbers for you? In most cases, you will. Click on the Bib Numbering tab to create your number ranges. If you create one single race from, say, 1-1000 then every accepted registration will just get the next available bib number. In most cases, though, you will want to issue different races numbers for each race. To do this, create the number ranges you want and then use the Filter Editor to create one (or more) Race filter(s) for that number range.

Create the Registration Product

To be able to receive payment for ANYTHING on Director, it must be defined as a Product. Registration fees are defined as Products just like t-shirts or bus tickets. So the next step is to create your Registration Product.

  1. Create a New Product: /Stores/Products & Skus -> Add New
    In most cases, you will only create one Product for each event and the SKUs within that product might be “5k”, “10K”, etc. However, if each race distance has a large number of options (e.g. Local Entrants Price / Overseas Entrants Price or Adults / Juniors / Children) then you might opt to have one Registration product per Race. You can have as many registration products as you like and each Product will be presented as an expand/collapse “accordion” item on the entry form front page. Just make sure you select a product type of “Registration“.
  2. Setup the Product: /Stores/Products & Skus -> Edit (you should already be in the Product Editor page after Step 1 above)
    1. On the Product tab, select the event you created above under Associated Event and click the update button.
    2. On the SKUs tab, click the Add New button to create a SKU for each entry fee that should be available at one time. For example, you might have 5K Adults, 5K Juniors, Marathon, etc
    3. When creating each SKU, the SKUu Name will appear on the front of the entry form in bold text and the SKU Description will appear below it. Use the description to summarise who should use this particular SKU, what the entry fee includes etc.
    4. Ignore Stock On Hand field, it is not currently used for Registration products.
  3. Complete Setup of SKUs
    1. Before your entry form will work, you must setup two additional properties of each SKU; SKU Items and SKU Pricing Bands. You can access both from the Actions drop-down menu next to each SKU.
    2. SKU Items creates the crucial link between the Stores sub-system and Event/Registration sub-system. Without it, your entry form will not work. The SKU Item tells Director what particular race (or races – if this is a family entry or a series pass type entry) that this SKU will purchase. It can also be used to set age limits on the SKU so that, for example, you can create one SKU (price) for Adults and a different one for Juniors. Click the ADD NEW button and create ONE SKU Item for each SKU. Leave min/max quantity as 1 and complete the details in the Race Specification section and ignore the Product Specification section.
      Important! In the vast majority of cases, you should only have one SKU Item for each registration SKU.
    3. SKU Pricing Bands. Most events operate on the basis that entry fees gradually increase as the event date approaches. For example, Earlybird entry fee, Standard entry fee and Late entry fee. Use the SKU Pricing Bands screen to create pricing bands for each SKU you have created. To ensure that the SKU is always available, you will need to make the End date/time of one pricing band equal to the Start date/time of the next one. Director will seamlessly adjust the pricing of the SKU at the designated time. Be sure that one of the pricing bands covers the current time, otherwise you will not be able to try your entry form out.

Complete Store Setup

We’re almost ready to try out the entry form …

  1. Go to the Store Dashboard (Stores -> My Stores -> click on Dashboard icon).
  2. On the Store Contents tab, click on the Add New button and select the registration product that you just created. Leave all other options in the popup in their default state.
  3. On the Payment Methods tab, click the Add New button and select the Ecom Test payment method from the drop down list. Slide the checkout selectors to ON for Standard and Admin checkouts.
  4. On the Documents tab, click the Add New button and add the following document types to start with:
    1. e-ticket
    2. Success
    3. Waiver
    4. Invoice Header
      … just use the default documents the system has already created for now. You can easily change them later.

Launch!

The moment of truth! In the Info Pane – on the left side of the screen – click the big red “Launch Store” button. Your entry form should appear in a new tab and you can work through the entry process to try it out. When you get to the checkout, you can complete the process by using the Test Payment button. To use the test payment method, enter a credit card number of 4111111111111111 (4 and 15 1s) plus any future expiry date and any 3 digits for the CVV. This will return a success message and then you can be redirected to the Director success page.

Important! Test registrations will be billed to your account, so be sure you only do one or two. There is no need to do one every time you tweak the system as you can run almost the entire test without completing the checkout and you can use an existing registration to review changes to the e-ticket, success page, etc.