Event Espresso 2016 Year in Review

Well, another year is behind us, and we’ve moved on to 2017. As we wrap up an incredible 2016, we feel grateful to be able to partner with our customers and together push the boundaries of event registration and ticketing. We can’t help but get excited for what 2017 will bring.

An Ongoing Commitment to Customers

In 2016 we saw a continued commitment to the success of our clients, significant new product innovations, and a shared team passion for giving back. We released dozens of new features, payment gateways, and integration’s that made our event registration tools more powerful. We doubled down on patching holes, fixing bugs, and optimizing code.

A short list of things we accomplished in 2016:

• Attendee Mover Add-on — Easily move attendees between different events. Works perfect for those times when someone registers for the wrong event.
• REST API added to Event Espresso 4 Core — As soon as the WP REST API went into WordPress Core, we were ready with our REST API. Adding the REST API opened the door to scaling core features of WordPress and Event Espresso 4.
• Public Roadmap for Development Planning — We opened a Trello Board for customer feedback and high-level development planning.
• Affiliate WP Integration — Enabled  Event Espresso 4 customers to leverage the power of affiliates to promote your events from their websites.
• 2016 Hosting Survey — Many customers ask us about hosting, so we proudly to point them to our yearly hosting survey so they can easily see what’s working for other Event Espresso users.
• Check-in and Ticket Scanning Mobile Apps — The Event Espresso 4 check-in & ticket scanning event app is available for Android and Apple devices!
• Flexible Payment Methods add-on — Provide your customers with accurate information on how to pay for their registrations (e.g. call a phone number to pay, pay at the door, etc.).
• Event Check-in App Customization Add-on — Quickly customize the Event Espresso 4 event check-in app. Upload and display your logo in the app screens.
• Added PayPal Express to Event Espresso 4 Core — Due to inconsistencies and bugs in the PayPal Standard payment processing service, we ended up replacing our PayPal Standard integration with another PayPal product, PayPal Express. PayPal Express is now the default PayPal payment method in Event Espresso 4.
• Launched Six New Payment Methods  — Authorze.Net E-check, iPay88, MIGS, PayPal Express – bundled in core, Quickbooks, and Transfirst.

The Year in Development & Support

Our development and support teams were very busy writing great code, implementing new systems, and helping customers. The rest of the team doesn’t blog much, so I’ve compiled some things they’ve accomplished over the last year.

Team Collaboration in 2016:

• Event Espresso 4 Core updates released: 39
• Gateway updates released: 23
• Add-on updates released: 9
• Software version updates across all products: 97
• Payment gateways published: 6
• New add-ons released: 3
• Cups of coffee devoured: ~ 3,520

Development Team 2016 Year in Detail:

• Code commits to Event Espresso 4 Core: 5,281
• Code commits to add-ons & gateways: 1,451
• Code commits to all products: 6,732
• Total lines of product code maintained: 590,155
• Code commits to eventespresso.com: 464
• Code commits to eventsmart.com: 1,678
• Internal issue/feature tracker tickets resolved: 775

Sales & Support Team 2016 Year in Detail:

• Support forum topics created: 5,691
• Support forum replies: 13,342
• Sales/support emails per day: 189
• Internal issue/feature tracker tickets created: 1,136

Giving Back to WordPress

We never lost sight of what’s important to our company — giving back. In 2016 our team spent roughly 120 hours giving back to the WordPress communities, attending, sponsoring and volunteering at WordCamp throughout the US.

A few ways we’ve given back to the WordPress community in 2016:

• Attended WordCamp San Diego — Another one of my favorite WordCamps. Why? Not just because the location is so great, but because of all the beautiful WordPress peeps that attend! With big names like, Adam Silver, Carrie Dils, and Chris Lema on the speaker’s list. You can’t go wrong.
• Attended/Sponsored WordCamp Salt Lake City — As always, WordCamp Salt Lake City was a fairly small and informative event. Since this WordCamp is in my home state, and one of our ex-employees, Chris Reynolds organizes the event, I always make it a point to show our support.
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  Image credit: Sitelock

  Attended/Sponsored WordCamp Phoenix — This is probably one of my favorite WordCamp’s this side of the Rio Grande! My favorite part of the 2016 WordCamp Phoenix was the visit to GoDaddy Headquarters, where I got to slide down an adult-sized green slide, see their brightly colored desks, bikes, and pedal-powered go carts.

• Attended WordCamp Vancouver — Our developer Michael Nelson boarded a ferry, a seaplane, and rode in a taxi, both ways, just to attend.
• Sponsored Sunday Breakfast at Website Weekend Los Angeles — We decided to reach out to the organizers of Website Weekend Los Angeles and sponsor the Sunday Breakfast expenses at their event.
• Organized Many Local WordPress Meetups — This past year, I organized and presented at 12 local WordPress Meetups in my community throughout 2016. I’m pretty sure a few members of the Event Espresso Team also attended a local Meetup in their community.
• Conducted a Hosting Survey — I already mentioned this above, however, I feel this is something worth mentioning again, as the hosting survey helps the WordPress community in general.
• Sponsored Kitchen Sink WP — When Adam Silver asked if I wanted to sponsor one of his podcasts, I jumped on the opportunity in a flash. We didn’t receive much traffic from the sponsorship, but it gave us the warm and fuzzies to help out.
• Developer Contributions — Combined, our developers spent approximately 80 hours communicating with various WordPress developers, submitting patches, and participating in WP REST API development in 2016.

Going Into 2017

We are all looking forward to 2017 and releasing great new features for Event Espresso. In my opinion, we spent too much time focusing on things outside of our core product in 2016. For instance, we spent a lot of time making Event Smart better, working on a secret project, and fine-tuning Event Espresso 4 core. Don’t get me wrong, these are great uses of time. However, it didn’t help improve our core product, nor allow us much time to work on things that matter to our customer’s, such as recurring events and automated email reminders.

We love producing great event booking software and are committed to improving the quality and reliability of the core product. Therefore, our primary focus going into 2017 is making Event Espresso better. Better than ever before. The Event Espresso 4 core developers have already begun planning the next phase of Event Espresso, started refactoring core systems and preparing for the next major features. I am honestly looking forward to a fantastic year in 2017.

What would you like to see in 2017?

Let us know in the comments below what your most anticipated features are or cast your vote on your most wanted feature on the feature roadmap.