OT: CMS advice for event registration

[Matt Price]

Hi folks,

has anyone used  a CMS with a really good event registration plugin?
I'm building a registration site for a canoe race that needs to generate
some of the  form elements dynamically (people sign up for a race, then
choose which boat they're on or else add a new boat; the list of boats
is grabbed from mysql, because it's always changing). 

I've started coding something from scratch; since i am very lousy coder
it's going very slowly, but I've at least learned a little javascript,
which is kinda fun.  Doing it this way is nice because i can design the
database myself and, now that' I've learned how to do it, adding dynamic
form elements is pretty straightforward.

However, i'd like to have this be something i can pass on to someone
else to administer in future, and it would be nice if it integrates with
an easy-to-use weeb framework -- I was thinking drupal, which seems to
be pretty good at creating a calendar of events, integrating that with
other kinds of content, etc.  It would also be great if the databasing
was all done for me, and reports were relatively easy to generate -- i
haven't dealt with that part yet and since my php is very clumsy i
expect it will take me a pretty long time on my own.  

However, trying to get drupal to do what i want seems like more work
than writing from scratch!  it seems impossible -- but I can't for the
life of me figure out how to generate a flexible signup form, and then
get the info I want stored inside drupal.  It can't be as hard as i
think it is, but the drupal ecosystem is pretty complicated and i can't
navigate it very well.  Modules that seem like they'd help (signup,
event, a couple others) don't seem to do what I want -- though if you
use them and know they would, pleeeeaase let me know!

Anyway -- a longwinded way of asking if anyone's done something similar
to this, or has better advice than semi-random googling can offer!
thanks as always to the group,

Matt


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