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:
The enhanced single page checkout allows registrants to:
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.
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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
One easy and powerful way to build a relationship with your attendees is to enable commenting about your events—right on the event page!
Allowing comments on your event page allows potential registrants to ask frequently asked questions that can help other people make a decision whether to attend your event (or not).
Commenting also allows past attendees to rave about your events and offer a review for other people considering your next event.
Your events are awesome, make sure it’s super easy for people to talk to you—and others—about them with comments on your event page!
The WordPress commenting system allows you to configure moderation settings, reply right within your event page (see above image) and much more! The layout, style and format of comments are configured on a theme-by-theme basis or adopt the design from your theme.
We know you can’t always create an event and publish it all in one sitting. Publishing a new event can take time. With draft events, you can work on your event pages over a period of time or hand them off to someone else for editing before you publish it live to your website.
Event Espresso 4 will automatically save the events you have in-progress as “drafts”, plus you can save them as a “draft” as you go. You can even schedule to publish your event at a later date and time.
We give you several ways to engage with other members of the Event Espresso community.
Purchase your support license and get immediate access to the Event Espresso expert community.