i would normally agree with jdtoronto, there's no such thing as a free lunch. but skimming through the post i see k12 and professional development which =~ high school teachers taking classes to be better teachers. there are few things more worthy of charity.

to the original anonymous poster: send me email

  h  a  y  t  e  r  @  u  s  c  .  e  d  u
[download]

with perl somewhere in the subject (so it doesn't get lost) and i'll help with code and prying answers out of the monastery...

hopefully some Microsoft experienced monk will lend a hand, i claim 20 years of hackerdom without ever using a windows machine for more than a terminal so i'm lost on that side of the project.

some questions to think about:

• do you already have any sort of database.
• are you a student or faculty/staff.
• do you have any IT support, are you the top geek? can you install modules and applications? unless they're already there cgi/database needs a lot of modules to do the grunt work.

your project will end up being more than you initially thought. once you start with the database/cgi thing there are bells and whistles that are just too easy to add to not go ahead and add them.

• storing the class information in the database as well so the user doesn't have to type them in but can choose from a list.
• giving the current number of people signed up for a certain session so the user can try to pick the session that's most likely to have enough people to not be canceled.
• email to the people who signed up when a class is confirmed or canceled.
• a password protected admin page.

for any monks interested i've been using Maypole to implement a User Attribute Release Policy Editor component for our local implementation of Shibboleth (which lets us locally authenticate a user and pass certain attributes to other shibb sites for them to use to authorize access). Maypole has made it quite easy to get the basic framework up and working, the first few customizations have been easy, the design seems clean. so a thumbs up for Maypole.

for something like this class registration problem once a compatible database is installed and a schema created Maypole and it's prerequisite modules will do 90% of the work with no help. the rest is restricting access, tweaking display and providing the admin functions that don't directly map onto insert/update/delete type actions.

i wish i had worked with some of the other cgi application frameworks so i could give a good comparison with Maypole, but i can at least say that it gives a good first impression.