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.

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.

Now you can keep a running record of comments for each registrant on their Contact Profile page. Private commenting allows you to keep a record of when they contacted you, your internal comments, and how you helped them.

Currently, comments on contacts are a private status but they can be enabled to be viewed or used on the front-end by a developer.

The ticket selector (pricing option selector) in Event Espresso allows you to present multiple ticket options to registrants so they can choose the registration options that will best fit their needs.

This will allow you to:

• Offer multiple ticket and pricing options for the same event
• Communicate ticket availability with a unique status per situation
• Check the quantity of tickets remaining per ticket type or datetime
• Optionally show the details of a single ticket including the: ticket description, ticket sale start and end dates and times (datetimes), access to which datetimes are available, and number of datetime uses.
• Optionally not display the number of tickets sold and remaining
• Limit the number of tickets that can be purchased per order, per event

Offer Multiple Pricing Options

With Event Espresso 4, each pricing option that you create will show in the ticket selector (pricing option selector). A pricing option (e.g. a ticket) is always displayed (unless deleted) so that attendees/registrants become aware of the pricing options. However, each ticket will only become available for purchase when the ticket conditions (e.g. date and time) are met.

You can offer multiple types of tickets for any event. You can also do great things like Graduated Pricing or Ticket Bundles.

Ticket Selector Embed Code

The Ticket Selector Embed Code feature allows you, or anyone with the embed code to display a ticket selector, for your events, on a different websites HTML page, Facebook page, WordPress.com and/or WordPress.org posts and pages.

Ticket statuses

The ticket configuration options are very powerful and flexible to accommodate many ticket options. Each ticket can have a possible of four statuses, based on the ticket conditions (e.g. number of tickets available, start and end datetimes, event datetime capacity limits, etc.).

The front-end ticket statuses are: “Available”, “Expired”, “Not Available”, “Sold Out”, and “Goes on Sale [date]”.

Available

• Ticket Quantity: there are ticket quantities available for sale.
• Event Datetime Limit (capacity): the event datetime has not reached capacity.
• Goes on Sale: date and time (datetime) has occurred.
• Sell Until: date and time (datetime) has not yet occurred.

Expired

• Ticket Quantity: there are ticket quantities available for sale.
• Event Datetime Limit (capacity): the event datetime has not reached capacity.
• Goes on Sale: date and time (datetime) has occurred.
• Sell Until: date and time (datetime) HAS occurred/passed.

Not Available

• Ticket Quantity: there are ticket quantities available for sale.
• Event Datetime Limit (capacity): the event datetime has less capacity than a ticket requires. The Min or Max ticket Quantities can not be met, e.g. a minimum purchase of 10 tickets is required, but there are only 8 available.
• Goes on Sale: date and time (datetime) has occurred.
• Sell Until: date and time (datetime) has not yet occurred.

Sold Out

• Ticket Quantity: there are NOT ticket quantities available for sale, OR see Event Datetime Limit.
• Event Datetime Limit (capacity): the event datetime has/has not reached capacity.
• Goes on Sale: date and time (datetime) has occurred.
• Sell Until: date and time (datetime) has not yet occurred.

Goes On Sale

• Ticket Quantity: there are ticket quantities available for sale.
• Event Datetime Limit (capacity): the event datetime has not reached capacity.
• Goes on Sale: date and time (datetime) has NOT yet occurred.
• Sell Until: date and time (datetime) has not yet occurred.

Ticket Details

You have the ability to educate your customers in great detail about a ticket (if you want).

Description

The ticket description can give a sales pitch about a ticket or just explain logistics. Some HTML characters are allowed in the description field.

Ticket Sale Dates

The individual tickets have separate “Goes On Sale” and “Sale Ends”. When the event “Goes On Sale” datetime occurs, the ticket becomes available for sale. When the “Sale Ends” datetime occurs, the ticket becomes “Expired”.

Event Access

Rather than purchasing multiple tickets for several different occurrences of an event, the event manager can configure each ticket to have the capability to access many dates and times (datetimes) for a single event.

Event Date Ticket Uses

Even though a ticket has the potential to access multiple date times (see Event Access just above), an event manager may only want to allow the ticket to be used a certain number of times among all the possible options. For example, a yoga ticket might have access to 10 different class datetimes, but the instructor might only sell a five-session pass. The ticket has the rights to access all 10 classes, but it can only be used a total of five times for any of the 10 sessions.

Maximum Ticket Purchases Per Order

As part of the event configuration, the event manager can decide how many tickets they will allow to be purchased in one order. For example, you may only want to allow attendees to purchase four tickets to the event so that many different people can attend. This can be changed in the event editor > “Event Registration Options”.

Our Google Maps integration allows event managers to configure the look and control settings of Google Maps on the event listing and event details pages.

Event Listings & Event Details Settings

The event listings and registration page (event details pages) have several configuration options including map height and width, map navigation controls, and map style and alignment.

We’re always trying to make your job easier so you can get things done faster. One nice tool in Event Espresso 4 is the ability to create Default Tickets.

If you find yourself creating similar tickets for many of your events, you can set one of those tickets to be created by default the next time you create an event.

Simply select the “use this new ticket as a default ticket for any new events” option at the bottom of the Advanced Settings on a ticket and activate the checkbox. See Multiple Pricing Options for more details.

The next time you create a new event, your default ticket will be added to the event and you can make any necessary changes.

Related features:

• Price Types
• Default Prices
• Multiple Pricing Options

We give you several ways to engage with other members of the Event Espresso community.

• Community Chat Room
• Support Forums
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Linkedin
• Google+
• Hire a Developer

Purchase your support license and get immediate access to the Event Espresso expert community.