We had our very first public hangout this morning. If you missed us, you can check it out in the hangout archive. You can get the audio in your iTunes automatically by subscribing to our podcast or go watch it on YouTube. Don’t want to miss us next month? Add it to your calendar.
Want to get the scoop on the latest developments in the Event Espresso plugin? Have a question about how to set up Event Espresso on your site? Curious about Event Espresso and want to know more about it before you take the plunge? We’ll be starting a new, monthly hangout on the second Tuesday of every month. Our first episode will be next week!
Here’s your chance to hear directly from us. In this regular one hour chat, we’ll cover all sorts of topics in Event Espresso and WordPress in general. We’ll also be featuring customer sites and case studies, and answer questions submitted via Twitter or our IRC channel. If you aren’t already following us on Twitter, do it now, so you can be sure to catch us live when we go on at 9am MST. Can’t make it? Submit your questions via Twitter with the hashtag #EventEspresso or post your questions in the comments below and we will pick select issues or questions that you have. Already a nerd? You can join us on Tuesday on freenode in #eventespresso-support channel.
Topics and format are subject to change — this is our first attempt at doing something like this, but we’re excited and think it will bring a new way to connect with you, our users, and address some topics that you are specifically interested in. So let us know what you want us to talk about! Need a prompt? How about, what should we call the hangout? We thought of Coffee Talk, but your feedback is welcome!
Use the links below to add this to your calendar:
We’re making some exciting behind-the-scenes changes with how we’ll be handling the language files in the next version of Event Espresso and moving forward. Some things will be drastically different but we’re doing this with our users in mind so there will be very little on your end that you need to worry about except in some very specific cases, which I’ll cover in this post.
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Currently, Event Espresso bundles all of our language files in the plugin. This leads to a very large plugin. Over 25MB is used just for the language files after they are extracted. Some hosts — particularly shared servers with limited resources — will throw script timeout or max_file_upload errors when uploading or installing Event Espresso. The compressed size of Event Espresso is over 7MB currently, which exceeds the 5MB threshold that’s often the default for shared servers. The new compressed size of Event Espresso with this update is just over 3MB! No more max_file_upload issues. No more script timeouts. The install and update process will be much smoother and faster.
Starting with the next release, 3.1.30, we will be discontinuing the inclusion of all language files in the core Event Espresso plugin. This will drastically reduce the size of the overall plugin, making installs and upgrades much faster and eliminate a lot of the current issues that people have with their installs and updates.
Instead of bundling the language files in the core plugin, we’re offloading those files to a GitHub repository. If you are using one of the language files (e.g., you have a locale set in your wp-config.php via the WP_LANG definition), Event Espresso will dynamically fetch just those language files from the GitHub repository and download them into your /event-espresso/languages/ directory.
Nothing. If you aren’t using the language files, you won’t notice any changes with the possible exception of updates being faster than they were previously.
It’s possible that the files don’t download correctly from GitHub. This is a worst-case scenario as it should magically work out of the box when you update. If this happens, you can download the relevant language file from our public GitHub repository and upload it to your /languages/ folder.
With every Event Espresso update, if there have been updates to the language files, they will automatically get downloaded to your /languages/ directory and overwrite the existing language files. If the language files have been updated and you would like to incorporate the updated language files before the next release of Event Espresso is available, you can do so by downloading the files from GitHub.
If you’ve modified your language files (for example, to modify a string to display a different message), you will now be able to upload your customized language files to /wp-content/uploads/espresso/languages/. This will override the language files in /event-espresso/languages/. You will be responsible for updating the language file if there are changes to the source.
For translators, nothing has changed, really, except that you can now download the final .mo/.po files from GitHub once they are added to the repository. However, for people who are familiar with Git and Github, please do not submit pull requests to the GitHub repository. They will be ignored. The proper process is still to get validator access on the GlotPress site and make your translations there. However, you will now also be able to upload customized/modified language files to /wp-content/uploads/espresso/languages/ if, for example, you wanted to test a translation you were making changes to.
Our translation project is 100% community-supported, and we are proud of how it’s grown. There are now 26 language files in development and we hope to continue to watch that figure grow and those translations fill out in 2013 and beyond. If you would like to be involved in one of our translations or to translate Event Espresso into a language we don’t have yet, please fill out our translator application and we will get your account set up.
This week, we’re shipping a new version of Event Espresso — 3.1.29 — to add some new features and bugfixes and correspond with the release of WordPress 3.5. 3.5 is a major release for WordPress, with a lot of stuff happening under the hood. We’ve done our best, working with the release candidates, to catch all the bugs and there are a few key points that we wanted to point out as you prepare your sites for these updates.
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I can’t stress this enough: when you are making any major changes to your site (which includes updating plugins or WordPress core), if something goes awry or there is an unforeseen bug that slipped through testing and you are without a backup, you are relying on your host to have a backup of your database — if you’re lucky, they’ll have one within the last week; if you’re less lucky, it may be as much as a month or more old. Backup before you upgrade, that way you have something to go back to immediately after something goes wrong (in the unlikely event that it does). Both WordPress and Event Espresso don’t “roll back” easily — there are still changes made in the database when you update that don’t get rolled back by just removing the newer version and putting back the older version, and you could lose data or introduce new issues by trying to “roll back” your WP or Event Espresso installation. If you are even considering “rolling back” as a failsafe, that’s even more incentive to create a backup before you update.
For more information on how to create a backup, refer to our support document on creating a backup for a guide and additional links.
Like some issues we saw last year with the release of WordPress 3.4, there are a few issues that show up after upgrading to WordPress 3.5 if you are using Event Espresso 3.1.28.5 or lower. This is part of the reason we’ve been working long hours testing and bugfixing this version of Event Espresso. If you upgrade to WordPress 3.5, you will need to upgrade Event Espresso to 3.1.29 to prevent a number of front- and backend errors from showing up on your site. Additionally, if you are using the WP User Integration add-on, you will need to update to 1.9.6. Again, before upgrading anything backup your database.
Similar to the requirement to upgrade the WP User Integration add-on to 1.9.6, you’ll need to update your calendar to 2.0.4. This update went out quietly last week, so if you’ve already upgraded your calendar to 2.0.4, you don’t need to do anything. If you haven’t upgraded to 2.0.4 yet, you’ll need to upgrade when you update WordPress otherwise your calendar will not display at all. The update in 2.0.4 updates the fullcalendar.js library to the latest version to be compatible with the newer version of jQuery included in WordPress 3.5.
WordPress compresses and merges all the admin and front-end javascript into a single minified file. We saw during testing on some servers running WordPress 3.5 (though not all servers) that this caused javascript issues in the markup and prevented the datepicker and other js elements (like the TinyMCE buttons for the visual editor) from working. This is discussed somewhat on a post to the WordPress development blog with the following explanation:
Since compression from php can be problematic on some hosts there are several “switches” (constants) that manage it: define(‘CONCATENATE_SCRIPTS’, false); would turn off both concatenating and compressing of all scripts.
The solution, as alluded to above, is to add the following line to your wp-config.php file:
define('CONCATENATE_SCRIPTS', false);
This will disable the javascript compression which will resolve the issue. We consider this a workaround, however, since javascript compression is beneficial for a number of performance reasons. We will continue to look into a resolution for this issue in the next updates.
We will be adding more documentation in our documentation pages for this new feature, but we are proud to announce the release of a new option to display featured images in your event lists. This works similarly to Featured Images elsewhere in WordPress, though we are not using the same system, so if you are familiar with WordPress theme development, this will still be somewhat different than what you’re used to.
Featured image in the event list
Featured image in the event
This has been on the back burner for a long time and we finally were able to add it to this release. 3.1.29 introduces another new feature to add the event to your calendar as an .ical file (compatible with Apple, Google and Outlook calendars). The feature is also activated by default, but you’ll need to re-save your Template Settings to turn it on.
Add to calendar link
Event added to Calendar
When submitting a payment in the new Attendees Admin, Payment Status is automagically set depending on the relationship between Amount Paid and Amount Owing as such:
So if you are trying to set the Payment Status to COMPLETED while there is STILL monies owing, then the system will override and set it to PENDING.
In other words, the only way to set Payment Status to COMPLETED is to set the Amount Paid equal to the Amount Owing.
Event Espresso 3.1.29 addresses issues that have been experienced by people with thousands of events or attendees in the Event Overview. We revamped the administration area for managing events and managing attendees so that it loads MUCH faster if you have a lot of attendees or events in your system. The 500 record at a time limit has been removed and replaced with a new setting to only retrieve a specific number of records from the database at a time, and to paginate to the next group of results. This is better for performance than what was happening previously which occasionally caused significant server lag running huge database queries to return your results.
This actually isn’t new to 3.1.29 but we haven’t made a formal announcement; coupon codes now work with Multi Event Registration. To get started, set the new “Allow discounts in the shopping cart” option to Yes. Discount codes will only apply to the events that accept them (previously, coupon codes would apply to all events in the cart, which led us to disable the promo code box by default).
Another change to the way promo codes are handled is that the standard fixed price promo code will apply to each ticket. For example, a promo code good for $5 off previously would discount $5 off the entire order, now it will discount $5 for each ticket.
Groupons have been modified so that one Groupon code will apply to all the tickets for one event (similar to how promo codes used to work in the shopping cart).
The WP User Integration update includes some fixes to the payment confirmation page for WordPress 3.5. It also includes a major new feature we think you’ll find useful. We know how difficult it is to deal with editing user profiles for WP User Integration if you don’t want to give your users access to the WP backend. We minimized this somewhat with the addition of a My Events front-end shortcode recently, bringing the My Events page to the front end of the site. But users would still need to access the backend to update their user profile and add their address information to have those things saved for their next registration. This is why we built a shortcode that creates an edit user profile page and includes the Event Espresso profile fields. The only other way to bring these profile fields to the front end would be to code your own page or modify a plugin like Theme My Profile.
The edit user profile page also uses themeroller styles, so if you have themeroller active in your template settings, the edit profile fields will be styled accordingly. Be sure to check our documentation pages for documentation on how to use this new shortcode.
Because of recent changes to how the folder names for some of the add-ons have changed and how that ties into the automatic update system, you may not be receiving update notifications to some of the add-ons. Be sure to check your user account page for the current versions of each add-on and your Plugins page to see which versions you have installed. If you are using an older version and not receiving the update notifications, the easiest way to resolve this is to deactivate and delete the add-on from your Plugins, then download the zip file from your user profile page on eventespresso.com. Once you have the zip file, upload it to your server to install.
This is another thing that we say with every major release, but it bears saying every time: anyone who has templates in /wp-content/uploads/espresso/templates will need to update their templates or all kinds of things will break if they update the plugin and do not update their templates. Every release we see errors relating to template files that are outdated. Making customizations to the templates is a powerful thing — and like all development projects, when the core software changes, the files that are dependent upon the core software need to be updated to accomodate. With WordPress plugins and themes, this means replacing deprecated functions with new functions. With Event Espresso template files, this means replacing outdated function references with filters and hooks and new features that have been added. In the case of Event Espresso 3.1.29, the major changes to the template files deal with the features I just talked about — featured images and ical links, but there were also fixes added to registration_page.php and confirmation_display.php.
We hope that you’ll take a look at the changelog to see all the things that have been updated and that you enjoy the new features that have been added. In addition to what I’ve described above, we’ve also added the Eway Rapid 3.0 gateway, and many bugfixes. As always, if you have any questions or issues, let us know in our support forums. Downloaded WordPress 3.5 and Event Espresso 3.1.29 already? Let us know your favorite features in the comments!
We are happy to announce that we have finally released a video that explains everything about the best online event registration and ticketing plugin for WordPress.
We have a hard time explaining to even our family what we do, so we knew that a great video about Event Espresso could help us explain how we can help event organizers be successful and more profitable. We decided against highlighting just a certain feature or benefit, so we’re curious about what strikes you as you watch it.
Want to know more about Event Espresso? Check out our video and tell us what you think!
We would like to thank Megan Levens and the team at Secret Powers, who looked at the features on our website, listened to our ideas, created a script, and drew some really cool looking robots. Then created animations, recorded voice overs (with Christopher Sabat), and listed to our feedback, to create the awesome video you see above.
Thanks again everyone for watching and we hope you stay tuned for more!
Can you tell us what part of the video was most impactful or important?
We’ve been at this for over 3 years and in that time, we’ve used a ton of different tools to get the job done. Event Espresso has gone from being a one-man show to a team of 10+ and in that time we’ve learned, largely through trial and error, ways to effectively communicate to each other and our users. Here are a few of the tools we use internally and for EventEspresso.com.
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We’re predominantly Mac users with a few holdouts running Windows 7 and Linux. The apps covered here will be a mix of the popular votes from across all three platforms as well as web-based apps or systems.
We’ve been using IRC internally for the past year. It has successfully enabled us to communicate better as a team and respond to issues that come up in the forums and as we are developing code much faster. It’s hard to imagine how we managed to do things before we were using IRC. We have one closed channel we use for internal and development communication and another channel we’re planning on opening up to VIP members soon. To keep our private channel closed, we’re using IRC access restrictions. We also have a bot running Phergie that is able to do helpful things like pass messages to other team members who are away from their computers and Google searches, or not so helpful things like tossing each other a cookie, beer, wine or cocktail.
Phergie is also feeding posts from our P2 site (mentioned below) to keep the team updated on new comments and discussions happening there.
As far as apps go, for Mac, most of us started off with Colloquy before moving on to other things like LimeChat and Adium. For the Windows users among us, we’re predominantly using mIRC, and Xchat is the most commonly used client for Linux, though a Windows version also exists.
In the last month we’ve started trying to use Twitter for both internal and external communications. Everyone at Event Espresso was already on Twitter, and Event Espresso has it’s own Twitter account. On our personal accounts, we use the #EventEspresso hashtag for general Event Espresso-related tweets and #eesupport or #eedev for support or development-related tweets. Not only can we keep each other in the loop with what we’re doing, but this gives our users a level of transparency about what we’re up to as well. So, what are we using to manage Twitter? For OSX, there’s the native Twitter app in the App Store or, for everyone, the cross-platform web app TweetDeck.
To the developers out there, it should come as no surprise that Chrome and Firefox are our browsers-of-choice. The powerful tools of Chrome’s built-in inspector and Firefox’s Firebug extension are invaluable to developing and testing markup. For the Mac users among us there’s Parallels and Oracle’s VirtualBox for Windows virtualization for testing Internet Explorer.
Formerly, the popular favorite for screenshots with annotations was Skitch. Recent changes to the platform have been universally less well received by our team, and some of us have begun looking elsewhere. The Awesome Screenshot extension for Chrome is…awesome…for browser-based screenshots and Droplr and Screencast.com have also been used by some of us for sharing screenshots. I wrote up an Alfred* extension to replace the timed screenshot feature that Skitch dropped from their app.
* covered later…
Event Espresso uses Google Apps extensively, so many of us just use the Gmail interface for mail. However, the Sparrow for Mac is hands-down the best desktop email client and also has an iOS app replacement for Apple Mail. Speaking personally, Sparrow makes me actually enjoy looking at my email inbox. It’s definitely worth downloading the free (ad supported) version and convincing yourself it’s worth the ten bucks to use it without the ads.
While the cross-platform workhorse of FileZilla is definitely a favorite, some of the Mac users among us cling to Transmit, by Panic (who also make Coda), which also allows file transfers to Amazon S3 buckets (which we’re using as our CDN).
A good IDE is important when you’re spending all day staring at it. Sublime Text 2 gets our popular vote with some runners up being Coda and NetBeans. (If you’re looking for a good IDE or have just gotten started with Sublime, this is a great resource that goes through a lot of the amazing built-in features of the program as well as the plugins that can be added.) Windows users (that don’t want to deal with NetBeans) can either grab a copy of Sublime as well, or take a look at the free Notepad++.
Version control is essential for any development project, large or small. Even if you aren’t part of a team of developers, version control is invaluable in being able to “roll back” changes to an earlier version when something breaks. Having a solid, reliable version control system (and app) is a required part of ensuring that everyone on the team is looking at the same — and the correct — version of the code. Event Espresso currently uses Subversion for our version control (though we plan to eventually move to Git). Most of us Mac folk started out using Versions but have since migrated to Cornerstone. For Windows, there’s TortoiseSVN and for Linux, we recommend RapidSVN (if you’re not just more comfortable using the commandline). For Git, we recommend Tower (for Mac), the GitHub Git client (for Mac/Windows) or TortoiseGit (for Windows). Alternately, if you’ve already started using Sublime, there are excellent Git and Subversion extensions for Sublime, and NetBeans also has integrated SVN support as well as a plugin for Git support.
What other programs and apps are we using? Here are a few of our favorites:
But what about the plugins we use for WordPress, you ask? We use a combination of custom-built plugins, premium plugins and free plugins from WordPress.org. Here are the ones that are most frequently used or most essential to the site:
…as well as custom-built plugins handling the 404 pages, new bbPress topic notifications, testimonials, showcase sites, product features, and various Plugin Update Engine tweaks and add-ons. We’re also using a Google Custom Site Search for our search pages with a custom template and modified searchform so searches go to the Google search.
What are your favorite tools to use in your business or on your website? Let us know in the comments!
In an attempt to clean up, clarify, beautify, and increase design consistency across all of the forms throughout the registration process, there have been some significant changes to the HTML and CSS in the various templates.
Anybody upgrading to 3.1.28, especially those with customized templates, should check over ALL of their registration pages to ensure that the new changes don’t have a negative impact on their site’s design.
As well, if anybody has issues on the Payment Options page with images for the payment method buttons (gateways), then they should go to their Payments Settings page in the WordPress Admin and update their settings for the affected gateway. IF the image is still not showing up, then they should use the “Add an Image” button to locate the correct image on their hard drive, then resave their settings.
Any other questions?
We love to see cool websites running Event Espresso. Every once in a while we come across a real nice organization focused on helping others. Other times we get an opportunity to work on websites for churches, charities and other types of non-profit organizations. Recently I had the pleasure of working with Scott and Charlie at the Rainbows Hospice for Children & Young People in the UK.
Using Event Espresso to Support Their Mission
Charlie reached out to us to help with adding more functionality to their event listings and registration pages. He also wanted to accept single and multiple event registrations, and display events that do not accept registration, on their website. For the registration pages, he needed a way to display another set of buttons on the registration pages. One button needed to link to the registration form, and the other needed to add the event to the shopping cart. Since we’re the event registration and ticketing experts, we were glad to support a great cause.
Registration Page with Two Buttons
A few Customizations
In addition to helping with setting up their event listings page, I showed them how to create two buttons using a little bit of HTML and a built-in Event Espresso shortcode to get something like this (more on this below).
Updating to the Latest Version
They were several versions behind on updates, so I also helped get their version of Event Espresso and the addons updated. They had made a few customizations to the Event Espresso template files, based on the older version of the plugin. So I backed up their entire website and installed it on my local server so I could test the updates before deploying the updates to the live website and risk breaking things.
In order to see the exact changes they had made to the original template files. I used a program called Diffmerge, to compare the modified templates, in the uploads directory, to the original version of the templates that came with the currently installed version (not the current version) of Event Espresso.
After the Update
The update actually went pretty smooth, and I didn’t lose their customizations or any data. The only thing left to do was make a few tweaks to the shopping cart CSS, and add some HTML and a shortcode, so they can display a couple of nice buttons on the registration pages. The first button is an anchor link to the registration form below the event description and the second button links to the Multiple Event Registration page allowing attendees to buy multiple types of tickets at once.
Overall everyone involved is very happy with how the system turned out. It also made us feel good to help out an organization that plays such a great role in the short lives of the children, and their families, that the Rainbows Hospice for Children and Young People provide. So please take a moment to like them on Facebook, or send them a friendly Tweet, and say thanks for the good things they do for these children and their families.
If you are a non-profit organization, you may qualify for a discount on your future purchase of Event Espresso by filling out our Non-profit Application form.
About Rainbows Hospice for Children & Young People
Courtesy of their Facebook Fan Page:
https://www.facebook.com/rainbowsfanpage
Children with a short life to live have alot of living to do Rainbows Hospice for children and young People make every minute special
Rainbows Hospice for Children & Young People, based in Loughborough, Leicestershire is the children’s hospice for the East Midlands. Children and young people with life-limiting and life-threatening conditions come to the hospice for specialist respite stays, symptom management, palliative and end-of-life care. Their families, too, are supported and helped by Rainbows on their difficult journey. At Rainbows the emphasis is on enriching life and making each minute of each short life count. Each child is treated as an individual and helped by the skilled, experienced team to get the most from life and enjoy it to the full.
Providing Care
Rainbows aims to provide 1:1 care wherever possible on a needs led basis for all children and young people who use our service. We are a nurse-led unit with support from a team of doctors with expertise in children’s palliative and end of life care and symptom management. A minimum of 3 qualified nurses (two of whom are children’s nurses) are on duty at all times, and competency based care is delivered by a highly skilled multidisciplinary team.
The Care Team
The Care Team are supported by our Family Support Team who visit families at home or in the community as well as offering support when the children and young people are staying at Rainbows. Their work extends throughout the child’s or young person’s life and beyond into bereavement support as necessary.
Philosophy
Our philosophy is that children are children first and foremost – they are not ‘little adults’. We offer a holistic approach to all our work and aim to involve children and young people and their families at every step of the way.
Visit their website at www.rainbows.co.uk for further details.
The iPad app is getting closer!
The initial release will have all the same features as our Mobile Ticketing app. Soon after that we are planning on adding onsite event registration and event management. Please be sure to let us know your thoughts.
In order to keep up with the latest, and greatest, changes to the Apple iOS (version 6). We recently launched an update of our own. We completed a major overhaul (mostly performance and stability improvements) of our Mobile Ticketing app for the iPhone and iPod Touch.
The Ticketing addon and the Mobile Ticketing API have been updated as well. Both of these systems have received security and optimization updates.
It is highly recommended that you update to the latest versions of these systems. If you have questions, comments, or concerns. Please let us know in the forums.