Online Registrations — event registration platform

Meet U There is a Brussels congress agency that has been running events for a demanding audience since 2011 — international conventions and congresses for the pharmaceutical and chemical industries and the European institutions, among others. Every one of those events needs its own registration, and those registrations rarely look alike: different registration types and rates, their own programme of sessions, hotel bookings, online payment, badges and multilingual communication.

Until then, near enough every event was put together from scratch. Slow, expensive, inconsistent — and the data ended up scattered across loose tools and spreadsheets. The question for Major Tom: build one platform that lets Meet U There put any event online at speed, every time in that event’s own branding, and manage the entire lifecycle of a registration from a single place.

The hard part wasn’t one big screen. It was reconciling three requirements that pull against each other:

• Every event is different — types, prices, deadlines, sessions, hotels, languages and payment differ every time, and yet the form has to feel like the client’s own site.
• The whole lifecycle in one system — registering, paying, hotels, badges, mailings and exports, instead of a handful of disconnected tools.
• Run by the client — Meet U There have to be able to put together and adjust every form themselves, without a developer turning up for each event.

Instead of building a new application per event, we built one form engine: a single shared template and a single controller that render any form assembled in the admin panel. The organiser puts an event together from reusable building blocks — a multi-step wizard with sections such as profile code, personal details, registration types, agenda, hotel booking, confirmation and payment — and the engine does the rest.

Under the bonnet we hooked the friendly panel of a flat-file CMS (Kirby) up to a relational MySQL layer that carries registrations, payments and logs at scale. Branding, prices, availability and payment settings are configurable per event; payments run through Stripe and communication through SendGrid.

This is the heart of the platform. The same engine serves dozens of completely different events, because everything that makes an event unique sits in the configuration — not in the code. In the panel the organiser fills in the registration types, the agenda, the hotels and the branding; the engine reads that configuration, renders a fully branded wizard from it, processes the registration and sets payment, confirmation, badge and export in motion. The diagram below shows that connection, simplified.

Not every event works the same way, so there are three ways to start a form: with a personal code from an invitation (which pre-fills the form and ties it to the right person), with a shared access code per registration type — handy for a whole delegation or a partner company — or completely open, no code at all, for public events. In each case the attendee gets exactly the right form.

This is what registering looks like from the attendee’s side: a clear, step-by-step wizard, entirely in the event’s own branding. The images below are modelled on the real screens, with dummy data.

The forms pay attention. Details from a personal invitation arrive pre-filled and locked, so nobody accidentally overwrites someone else’s registration. The VAT number is validated live, and fields appear or lock depending on the registration type chosen — a partner field that turns up, a company field that becomes mandatory. That keeps the form short and the data that comes in correct.

At events with a programme, attendees put together their own agenda: plenary sessions, tracks, workshops and side events. Optional items carry a surcharge, and sessions with limited capacity show live how many places are left. The image below is exactly the same engine, but a different event — the red branding comes entirely from the configuration.

Attendees sort their stay out in the same flow. For each event the organiser sets up the hotels, room types and prices; the form shows availability live, per night and lets the attendee book their rooms along with the registration. No separate hotel platform, no admin done twice.

The last step sums everything up — registration type, programme, partner, hotel and the total including VAT — and lets the attendee pay securely by card through Stripe. Invoice and confirmation email land in the inbox straight away, and every registration gets a unique code so it can still be edited later.

Meet U There build and manage all those forms themselves, in a panel they already know. The strongest card in it: the form builder. The whole wizard is put together step by step here — drag to reorder, switch steps on or off, drop in reusable sections. Opening and closing dates, the confirmation email, the payment and the branding sit right next to it. Setting up a new event is a matter of configuring, not developing.

Every registration arrives in a searchable overview per event: type, extras, payment status and registration status at a glance, with the key figures on top and an export always one click away. No digging through mailboxes or spreadsheets — the organiser sees in real time where the event stands.

From that same panel, Meet U There send targeted mailings. One message with personal tags such as [name] and [pkregid] goes out to a precisely defined audience — every paid delegate, say, but not the ones who still haven’t paid. Sending runs through SendGrid: personalised, multilingual, de-duplicated and logged.

Every registration automatically gets a personal QR badge. At the door the welcome desk scans it and checks the attendee in live, with a clear view of who is already inside. The same data feeds the attendee and attendance lists — always correct, and ready to print.

Kirby as a flat-file CMS for the management side, extended with a relational MySQL layer for registrations, payments and logs. One shared template and one controller make up the form engine that renders every form and handles every submission — server-rendered PHP with targeted AJAX for steps without a reload. Payments through Stripe (each event with its own account and invoice numbering), transactional and bulk email through SendGrid, QR badges via Endroid and exports via PhpSpreadsheet. Custom panel fields bring agenda, accommodation and attendee choices into the admin in readable form. Runs on managed hosting.

• A CMS as an application platform — a flat-file CMS turned into a configurable registration engine with the scale and integrity of a proper database.
• One engine, every event — one template and one controller render every form assembled in the panel, entirely in that event’s branding.
• Reusable sections — profile code, personal details, registration types, agenda, hotel booking, confirmation and payment as separate building blocks, set per event.
• Smart, per-type logic — pre-filled and locked fields per registration type, live VAT validation and conditional fields.
• Live availability & prices — places, rooms and sessions with real-time counters and early-bird rates.
• Payment, badges & communication built in — Stripe with invoicing, QR badges with live check-in, and automated multilingual email, de-duplicated and logged.