After a few more nights, I finally got this to work as intended. I'm learning a few tricks on the side as well. Over all I'm happy with the package although I worry sometimes what the real cost of the structure is. You see Drupal has all these CCK fields which make it very flexible. In the database, each CCK field is actually its own database table . just can't shrug it off though that this flexibility will come at a price. ... let's take a registration form for example, - A form can have 10-20 fields - using ordinary relational DB structures you probably need to define 1 or at the most 3 tables corresponding to the entities and their relationships - in the case of registration I will typically create 2-3 table for the student, the course, and the last one for internal controls. With CCK I am working with at least 20 separate tables - 1 per field.  The site suddenly became ver sluggish. I will be looking into it tomorrow. The next phase of the work is mobile and integration once this performance issue is resolved.  ....   I don't think it is because of my php scripts although they use the OB (Output buffer)  a lot (mainly to resize the photo and create extract the e ticket pkpass.