[TYPO3-hci] Producing "reports" with TYPO3

[Lucas Thurston]

Hi all,
One request I keep hearing from my clients is for a way to produce 
"reports" from the backend.  I should probably define what I mean by 
"reports" since it could mean many things.  By "reports" I mean a useful 
and human-readable collection of data from database tables with little 
or no processing.

Say for instance we have a TYPO3 site with a conference registration 
extension.  Only registered fe users can register for conferences, so 
there's a database relation between the registrants and the fe_users 
table.  Imagine if, in the list module, certain fields from the fe_users 
(eg name, phone, email) table could be JOINed on the registrants table, 
then, using the CSV export feature that already exists, the site admin 
could produce a spreadsheet document of registrants.  This is a simple 
example--three or more tables ideally could be JOINed.

This would be an extremely useful feature for organizations and web 
admins without knowledge of sql/database normalization.  I would be 
interested in working on such a project.

Anyone have any thoughts on this?  How difficult would be it be to 
implement?  Does this fall into the realm of improving HCI?

best,
Lucas