Event Espresso (EE) is the most advanced WordPress events calendar, registration and ticketing plugin—and it just got even better! EE 4.6 includes three significant changes, a bunch of new features, a few enhancements and fixes, and compatibility for several new add-ons that are coming soon. Developers please take note.
Update notifications are being monitored and you will receive your upgrade notice over the course of a few days.
Significant Changes to Payment Processing, Checkout and HTML Forms
We expect that you will not notice most of these changes unless you start looking into the core code. We have worked hard to make sure the transition from these existing systems to the new systems as seamless as possible.
- New Payment Processing System – We have improved the system that manages processing payments. This new payment system will make it easier to add features around managing payment gateways, payment accounts, multiple payments, etc. You should not notice much of a difference right now from the 4.4 gateway system other than the user interface has been standardized. The real magic comes in the code which we will use to build new features that you have been asking for.
- New Checkout System – The checkout system has been improved to add flexibility in the order of registration steps, and add more intelligence based on the types of tickets being purchased. You may notice the front-end user interface looks even better. Again, the real gains will come over time as we add new features for event organizers and developers to customize the online event registration and ticketing checkout experience for their audience.
- New System for Displaying and Processing HTML Forms – The new Forms system is a new object oriented dynamic form system utilizing built in strategies for display, normalization, and validation; including over 25 input types.
New Features
We have added more than a dozen new features to our WordPress events calendar, registration and ticketing plugin. This makes this our best brew of Event Espresso ever.
- New payments system (see above)
- Open one payment method by default so that one payment method is defaulted or pre-selected for registrants
- Add compatibility for additional gateway integrations (see below)
- Developers: Mock payment method add-on (get it via GitHub: event-espresso-core/tests/mocks/addons/eea-new-addon)
- User capabilities system that allows you to manage access to Event Espresso with your favorite user and role or capability plugin, e.g. Members, User Role Editor (not an official endorsement of which plugin to use), previously an add-on in EE3
- More modular Single Page Checkout which allows you to re-arrange the order of the checkout steps
- Free event registrations are now a one step checkout
- Switch to the new NoCAPTCHA reCAPTCHA
- Event page template selector to account for different page layouts (e.g. full-width, etc.)
- Customizable receipt and invoice templates that can be edited from your dashboard to make them better for your organization or country requirements, no more FTPing necessary
- Message pack template system, and easy way to create different looking message layouts and choose them for each type of message
- Support for UTF-8 invoices and receipts
- Developers: New API for registering new Custom Post types and taxonomies with Event Espresso
- Registrations CSV report for all events so you can get all your data at once
Enhancements and Fixes
While most of the work done on 4.6 is tied to improving a few systems and adding new features, we do have a few small improvements.
- Events can be archived by tags, with a front-end tag archive listing page.
- Upcoming Events Widget now uses the WordPress defined date and time settings.
Compatibility with New Add-ons
While we refactored some major systems, we also took the opportunity to build more add-ons. We are in the final testing phase for many of these add-ons, so look for them to be available soon now that 4.6 is available.
- Printable tickets (now available)
- Ticket scanning, via barcode/qr code scanners (now available)
- WP User Integration (coming soon)
- Stripe payment gateway integrations (now available)
- SagePay payment gateway integration (coming soon)
- iDeal/Mollie payment gateway integration (coming soon)
For Developers
Many of the changes in 4.6 deserve your attention. For example, if you have built a custom payment gateway for Event Espresso 4.4 (or less) then you will need to evaluate whether it will be compatible with the new processing system. We have many resources for developers that can help:
The last thing I want to say is that it has been just under a year that we first released Event Espresso 4. In that year, we’ve released six major versions (averaging a major release every two months, which is on-par or better than the industry average). Obviously, our development rate has greatly improved, but we are changing our processes to get you new features even faster! More on that another time. 🙂
Thank you for using Event Espresso. Let us know what you think or if you have any questions.
The Multiple Event Registration add-on is super easy to use. Just install the plugin on your site, then the EE4 ticket selector and registration system is automatically updated to allow registrants the ability to add events to an “Event Cart”. Going forward, your customers will be able to add multiple events to their cart and checkout in a single, streamlined registration.
