Hello -

I'm trying to figure out if the product will match my customer's needs. I'm not looking for free review on this, btw - the reason I'm posting/asking is to get more of a simple "yes - good idea" or "no - don't use our product for this" kind of response. ;) I want to see if what we're looking to do even remotely matches the strengths of the product.

The customer is a non-profit with very, very light use and looking to do a program listing / event listing system. The majority of what they need seems to match the concept of a CMS, but with one exception (the initial registration).

Simplest version of what they're looking to do:

* a few simple roles of users
- submitter
- reviewer
- approver
- browsing (read) user

* Submitter can create a profile online to self-register. There is a credit card payment process associated with this. Probably the least CMS-y bit. I could probably do this outside of the CMS and use the API to create a registered user if need be.
* Submitter can then submit a few bits of data on their organization's profile
* Submitter can create one or more programs their organization offers
* Submitter can create instances of an "event" for a program - lots of required, etc. fields here with variable data types. Some lists, some dates, etc.
* Upon submission of an event, we route to a reviewer for feedback. Reviewer can reject or approve (act as approver).
* In some cases the reviewer is really just the "first" reviewer. The event can be sent to a second reviewer for approval/rejection. I guess, really, what we're seeing is just defined lists of serial or group approvals with lists of people in roles. What's odd is that the approval chain may vary based on the data the initial submitter enters for the event. They want to be able to validate elements and likely route to different reviewers / approvers based on individual element values (course difficulty, geographic region etc.)
* Browsing users can query the system via a search interface - this should pull back a list of organizations, programs, or events based on the criteria they enter.

The reason I'm leaning toward a CMS instead of a hand-tooled app or LMS/scheduling is they seem to like to extend/modify attributes and approval/routing rules as well as leverage the content in different page displays. I need something that will gracefully let us extend/modify the data elements as well as (ideally) let us search and re-use content. I'm just seeing "date" as an element of the event in this case - we can present that however we like and repurpose it (via search, etc.) to display calendars or whatever if they need to.

I don't _think_ this should be complex (the credit card registration thing is a nuisance in this case), but I'm really looking for some sort of feedback on if the product is really a good match for this need. I'd hate to suggest we investigate it if there's an immediate feeling of "bad match." I also want to avoid completely hand-tooling this - it just "feels" like a CMS type app to me.

Any thoughts? Yeah / nay?

Thanks in advance,
Eric