Event Espresso 4 gives you more control in understanding your customers and business. We’ve made it easier to know who your customers are and how they’ve done business with you over time.

Contact Profiles

The Contact Profile page stores the name, biography, contact information, event registration history, private comments, and more about each registrant. This is like a journal for each registrant who you have done business with in the past.

Each time this person registers for a new event, their contact information is updated so that you always have the best way to reach them.

Contact List

The Contact List organizes everyone who has ever been registered as an attendee in your Event Espresso system. You can filter, search, etc. to find the right customer.

This is one of the first steps we’re taking to help you offer a better experience to your attendees and help you become more successful.

The Event Espresso Check-in feature allows event managers to:

• Generate an Attendance List and export the list to a report in .CSV format
• Check-in Attendees for Record Keeping

Attendance List

The Check-in list of attendees are of two registration status types: Approved or Pending Payment.

• Approved – are registrations where a payment has been made (or is not required), or it has been manually approved by the admin.
• Pending Payment – registrations that are still awaiting payment.

These are the logical list of attendees. We include registrations that are still pending payment in the case that you allow registrants to pay at the door.

Check-in List

The check-in feature can be accessed online to record attendance. There are three statuses per registration: checked-in, checked-out, or no check-in record available.

Global Tax Administration

Event administrators can manage taxes globally via the default price types and default prices. Tax fees are also reported to the admin in several ways, and to the attendee during and after checkout.

Default Price Types

Basic tax types can be named and configured as flat amounts or percentages of the ticket price. Federal and State sales tax types are made available as default price types which can be modified to be renamed (if necessary) and to set the proper tax rate.

Default Prices

Administrators can enable taxes to be applied to individual taxes that were previously configured as a default price.

Per-ticket Tax Administration

Once the Tax Default Price Type has been configured, specific taxes can be made available to be applied on individual tickets (see Per-ticket Tax Administration).

Reporting Taxes to Administrators

Taxes are reported to event managers in the transaction details and registration report.

Transaction Details Record

The transaction record details the taxes that were charged for the entire transaction.

Registrations Report

The registration report details the taxes that were charged for each registration.

Reporting Taxes to Registrants

Taxes are reported to registrants in the ticket details ticket selector, during registration checkout, and in their order confirmation (PDF). The PDF order confirmation also reports the VAT/Tax Number configured in Your Organization Settings.

Ticket Selector – Ticket Details

Ticket buyers can read more about a specific ticket which includes the taxes that will be applied to that particular ticket.

Registration Checkout

The checkout confirmation (before payment) details the amount and type of taxes that will be applied during payment.

Order Confirmation (PDF)

The Order Confirmation PDF provides a section that lists the amount of taxes paid for individual types of taxes configured as a default price (above).

Configure your organization’s profile to be used throughout Event Espresso and your front-end templates/theme (may require customization for individual themes).

The organization fields include:

• Organization Name
• Street Address
• City
• State
• Country
• Zip/Postal Code
• Primary Contact Email Address
• Phone Number
• VAT/Tax Number
• Company Logo
• Facebook Profile URL
• Twitter Profile URL
• LinkedIn Profile URL
• Pinterest Profile URL
• Google+ Profile URL
• Instagram Profile URL

The enhanced single page checkout allows registrants to:

• Skip making payments for “free” or  no-cost tickets
• Use the “Primary Registrant” details to auto-fill the registration form for additional registrants with the same answers to your registration questions
• Update the personal information in their contact record by registering for subsequent events

No Payment Required for Free Tickets

When a registrant ONLY purchases a free ($0 or no-cost) ticket(s), they are not required to make a payment. “Step 2 – Payment Options” is skipped to make the registration process faster and more simple.

Registrations that are free (as in no cost) are automatically approved and given their registration and order confirmation.

Copying Primary Registrant Form Data to Additional Attendees

In order to make purchasing tickets faster, we’ve enabled the option for registrants to copy the information they entered for the primary attendee and automatically fill the registration form for any additional attendees. The data copied from the Primary Registrant form to the additional registrants form can still be edited for each additional attendee.

A notice is given to the person filling out the forms that even though the Primary Registrant data had been copied to the additional registrant forms, there may be questions specific for additional registrants that was not asked to the Primary Registrant and the Primary Registrant will still need to check each form to ensure that there are no other questions that need to be completed.

Updating a Contact’s Personal Information

When a registrant’s first name, last name and email address perfectly match that of an existing contact profile, that existing contact address information is also updated to remain as accurate and up-to-date as possible.

The Country Settings allow event managers to configure many of the country and currency settings that will be used throughout Event Espresso, including:

• Currency
• Currency Name, singular and plural
• Currency sign
• Currency sign before/after number
• Currency decimal places (none, 1, 2 3,)
• Currency decimal mark character (comma or decimal)
• Currency thousands separator (comma or decimal)
• Country telephone code
• European Union Country indicator
• Country appears as an option in the registration form
• Activate/deactivate states/provinces
• Manage (add, edit, delete) states/provinces
• Allow users to add states/provinces during checkout
• Manage (add, ignore) user-submitted states/provinces

Country Details

User-submitted Countries, States/Provinces

When a potential registrant is filling out their address information but the country and/or state/province is not available, they are presented with an option to add a new country state/province.

The attendee is asked to select their country and add their state/province.

Manage user-submitted states/provinces

When a registrant submits their own state/province, event managers are given the opportunity to activate or ignore the new state/province.

New to Event Espresso 4 is the capability for events to have:

• Multiple dates and times (datetimes) per event
• Individual datetime capacity limits
• Tickets are automatically locked when an assigned ticket is purchased
• Individual ticket options (including multiple ticket options per datetime)
• Datetime titles and descriptions

Multiple Datetimes per Event

Event Espresso 4 allows you to set up an event with multiple dates and times (datetimes). You no longer have to have the same event that occurs on a different date be a different event. This means you can use the same event page for many events. It is also now possible to keep the event published even after registration has closed, which is useful for archiving events. See the photo above for the datetime manager.

Individual Datetime Capacity Limits

Notice the “limit” field for each datetime in the graphic above. With Event Espresso 4, event managers now have the ability to set capacity limits for each datetime of an event. As the tickets that have access to a certain datetime are purchased, the datetime “Sold” value increments so that the datetime is not oversold (regardless of which combinations of tickets are purchased).

Automatically Locked Ticket Selection With Purchased Tickets

When a ticket assigned to a datetime is sold, that ticket cannot be unassigned from that individual datetime. This ensures accurate registration and transaction data. See the “lock” icon below in the lower right corner.

Individual or Customized Ticket Options per Datetime

Event Espresso 4 gets more advanced with the ability to have multiple and different tickets assigned to each datetime. Ticket options per datetime gives you a lot of control to build the access and ticketing options for almost any type of event. You can allow a ticket to have access to some datetimes and not others, based on the ticket purchased.

Individual Datetime Titles and Description

Each datetime can have a title and descriptions that can help with organizing events with a lot of dates (see top image). This datetime title and description is also used on the front-end as a way to sell/explain datetimes to attendees.

Our goal is to make Event Espresso simple and reliable enough for the basic user, but robust and customizable enough for the enterprise-level user. One of the major refactors in Event Espresso 4 was to move from procedural-based coding to Object-oriented programming (OOP).

The premise behind OOP is to organize code into smaller software systems that can be reused throughout the entire software application. The smaller objects can also be reused rather than programmed multiple times (as is done with Procedural programming).

Experienced developers will appreciate how far we’ve abstracted the Event Espresso code, added hundreds of hooks, and added comments throughout. Developers will find that this more advanced way of programming will facilitate more complex systems and add to the possibilities of what you can build with Event Espresso.

WordPress custom fields allow the post author to assign custom fields to a post (or in this case an event).

Meta-data is handled with key/value pairs. The key is the name of the meta-data element. The value is the information that will appear in the meta-data list on each individual post associated with the information.

There are advanced methods for referencing, displaying and using post meta-data functions.

Event Espresso 4 leverages your Permalinks configuration settings in WordPress. “Pretty” permalinks or web links (urls) that have relevant keywords add to the context of your events and is favored by search engines (a.k.a Google). Having keyword-rich event page urls is a generally recognized method to help improve your relevant search engine ranking and get more traffic to your website.

Pretty Permalinks

By default, WordPress uses web URLs which have question marks and lots of numbers in them; however, WordPress offers you the ability to create a custom URL structure for your permalinks and archives. This can improve the aesthetics, usability, and forward-compatibility of your links.

Event Espresso 4 Pretty Urls:

• Event pages, e.g.: yourdomain.com/events/youngling-jedi-training/
• Event lists, e.g.: yourdomain.com/events/
• Event categories, e.g.: yourdomain.com/event-category/jedi-yoga/
• Venue pages, e.g.: yourdomain.com/venues/palace-of-the-jedi/
• Venue lists, e.g.: yourdomain.com/venues/
• Venue categories, e.g.: yourdomain.com/venue-category/jedi-politics/

More Event Espresso SEO mastery is coming soon, and this is the first step. Event Espresso is also compatible with many of the top SEO plugins.