Stunning!

This is a stunning plugin, highly customisable, with excellent documentation, superb support and some really wonderful add-on options (of which I used the Locations Map, the Email Expansion Kit and the Custom Template Folder). I have used Participants Database to set up a listing of parent-support programs, some of which run face-to-face, and some remotely, for a small charity. It has been a real challenge in the past to get the providers of these programs to keep their program details (and hence, our listing of their programs) up-to-date, but Participants Database has all the features I need to make this as easy as it possibly could be by enabling self-service updating of records in a manner that is quite secure enough given the kind of information that is being handled. For me, a killer advantage of Participants Database over one of its notional competitors, RegistrationMagic, is that Participants Database does not treat a registrant’s email address as a key field, but allows participants to change this item of data – just one small example of the kind of forethought that has gone into its design. The range of hooks and filters available through Participants Database is just awesome, and the documentation contains many illuminating examples of how to work with these. The documentation is perfectly frank about what the plugin can and cannot be expected to do (it’s essentially built around a single table), but it can, to some extent, be made to look as if it handling several related sets of data by sensible use of field groupings, handling, for example, parent and player data for a children’s athletics club. I would give Participants Database ten stars out of five if it were possible to do so – and no, I don’t know the developer from Adam.