To allow you more flexibility and control while on-site of an event, we are investigating whether there is a need for an iPad event check in and registration app and how it should work. We want to make the best iPad app possible for you, so we would love to get your feedback on what you would like to see included in the app.
It doesn’t matter how small or big the idea is, please let us know your thoughts by commenting on this in the comments below or in the forums.
Posted by Seth Shoultes on Tuesday, September 11th, 2012
Event Espresso is a powerful event management and registration system that is perfect for many different types of events, including everything from Yoga classes to hockey games. However, I bet you didn’t know it has been used as a haunted house ticketing system?
Manage your haunted house ticket sales from your website
Why go through the hassle of using a third-party ticketing system when you can manage your ticket sales right from your website?
Haunted houses are fun and booming, but many haunted houses (like thesetwo based locally in Salt Lake City) waste your money by using a third-party online ticketing system. These third-party ticketing systems tack on a “Ticket Surcharge” or “Booking Fee” for each ticket purchased, in addition to transaction fees that are incurred by the company hosting the haunted house company. Not good!
Use a calendar to sell tickets
Event Espresso gives you many tools, right at your fingertips, to handle your haunted house ticketing. Right out of the box, you have access to a ticketing and payment system through your favorite merchant gateway. Many haunted houses will change their schedules, running more shows/admissions the closer you get to Halloween. With the Calendar add-on, you can let your visitors know what nights your haunted house will be open and let them purchase tickets for the evening they want to attend.
Make your life easier with multiple dates, tickets & pricing packages!
To make your life easier creating events, you can use the many ticket and pricing options available to you. Our system enables event managers to create a variety of ticket options to accommodate the maximum number of attendees and collect the right fees.
Ticket Selector
An unlimited number of tickets can be configured with the following options:
Use the Promotions add-on for Event Espresso 4 to add powerful and flexible promotional pricing features to your website. You can create discount codes and promotions that can be applied when registering for an event. The promotions feature gives you the ability to send your audience a discount code, or receive an automatic discount that reduces the price of a ticket(s)/registration(s).
As a haunted house owner, use the promotions feature to allow you to:
Target and re-target attendees with banners or email campaigns offering automatic discounts or giving them special discounts with a code
Distribute and promote your event through partners (speakers, sponsors, venues, affiliates, etc.) by offering them an exclusive coupon code they can share with their audience
Track and measure the performance of marketing campaigns and advertising
Reward loyal customers by offering them a special discount and incentivize them to attend again
Encourage customers to take action now by providing limited quantity or limited time discounts
Test and discover what pricing, distribution, marketing or advertising strategy works best for your audience(s)
Offer discounts to different target audiences so that your event is priced correctly
Here is a brief screencast demonstration for the Promotions & Discount Codes in Event Espresso 4:
Event Espresso’s customizable and printable tickets can make your organization look smart, capable, entertaining, and prepared. In addition to the Advanced Printable Tickets where you can change the default ticket, Customized Printable Tickets from Event Espresso will let you create custom ticket designs for each event separately. You can have one ticket design for one event and another ticket design for another event, plus maintain the default ticket type all at the same time.
You can customize the default look of your ticket for all events, with custom:
Logos
Colors
Layouts
Images
Dimensions
Attendee information (including their Gravatar image)
Event information
Ticket details
and more!
Your ticket can be any shape or size or color and contain almost any information you want to match your brand.
Mobile ticketing apps for attendance tracking
Our event app allows you to transform your Android or Apple mobile device into an onsite attendee management tool. The event app gives event managers the ability to manage check-ins at the door of your events. You can even use the event app to scan tickets (optional upgrade), check attendees in/out of events, view attendee/registration and event info.
Event managers can also login to the website to view attendance records, generate a list of participants and export the file to a report in CSV format.
The Event Espresso 4 event app allows you to transform your Android or Apple device into an onsite attendee management tool. It also lets you quickly check-in attendees and see information about your events and attendees. Built-in ticket scanning capabilities allow you to scan tickets (optional upgrade) at your classes, meetings, conventions, concerts, and everything in between.
Integrates in real-time with the attendee list in Event Espresso, within your website
Quickly view attendeS/registration info, such as:
Attendee list per datetime
Ticket purchases
Payment status
Check-in status
Allows for multiple check-in “stations”. Eg, use multiple Android/iPhone devices to log into to the same attendee list so employees can check-in attendees using multiple different devices
Mobile-to-mobile QR Code scanning helps to keep your events “Green” by providing an environmentally friendly ticketing solution
Makes your organization efficient and innovative with easy access to event info, such as:
Event list
Venue info
Datetimes
Registration totals
Capacity Statistics
Event Espresso No Fee Ticketing Software Saves You Money
Best of all we do not charge you per-ticket fees – a hot button issue for many haunted house managers! If you have not yet chosen an online ticket software for your haunted house ticketing, know that our yearly subscription based pricing can potentially generate additional revenue for you.
Ready to Buy a Support License for Event Espresso? All the tools you need to get started are included in the EE4 Everything Support License.
Get Your Money Sooner
Unlike other event and attraction ticketing companies, who hold on to your ticket sales money until after the party, Event Espresso allows you to choose the payment processor, so the money goes straight to you as soon as tickets are sold – just like a product sale. That gives you the money you need to cover bills, pay for venue rental, and even earn interest.
And if your current haunted house ticketing system doesn’t provide the tools mentioned throughout this post, please contact us at your convenience, or post to the pre-sales forums and we’ll do our best to help explain how it can work for you.
Posted by Chris Reynolds on Tuesday, September 11th, 2012
University of Utah Hockey
Our friends at the University of Utah Hockey needed a way to sell season tickets to the students and local hockey fans. We added the Multi Event Registration addon to their site and helped them customize their Event Espresso installation so they can sell season tickets.
However, they also needed a way to sell the tickets with volume discounts after a certain amount of tickets were added to the customer’s shopping cart. With the new Volume Discounts add-on, a discount is applied to the total amount of the tickets. Volume Discounts allows the team to sell tickets at a discounted rate which works perfectly for people that purchase a season pass to all the games up front. Volume Discounts is currently in beta and will be made available as part of our premium licenses soon, but for now you can download and play with the beta version.
We recommend using categories, so you can assign a volume discount to a specific category, but you can also assign a volume discount to all categories. For their site, we set the discount threshold at $70. Once the total value of the price in the cart hits $70, the total for all tickets is discounted 50%.
To take a look at final result, visit the University of Utah Hockey’s season tickets page. If you are a license holder for Event Espresso, you can learn more about how we set up their season tickets, download the beta version of the plugin for free (for a limited time) and learn about the custom function we added to their site to automatically add 1 seat to all items in the cart, by taking a look at the new Volume Discounts doc here.
Event Espresso 3.2.a.1 (Alpha) Now Available for Download
We are pleased to announce the first Alpha release of Event Espresso, 3.2 is available for download. This first release brings to life several important changes and highlight the future of Event Espresso.
Some of the most significant changes are:
a new checkout process that allows attendees to select multiple ticket types
a new admin interface that optimizes and consolidates the event editor page
greater granularity with respect to managing transactions, registrations and attendees
additional reporting by transactions, registrations and attendees
It can happen at any time. You’ve opened your event for registrations and you are suddenly inundated by obviously fake users and incomplete transactions. Spam is everywhere (and we don’t mean the food). It’s in your inbox, it’s in your comments, and it’s in your events.
Where does it come from? A lot of spam — particularly the type of spam that fills up contact forms (and event registration forms) — comes from a specific kind of script designed to identify potential security holes in your site like this one. These types of applications are designed for admins to check their site before deploying it live, but in the wrong hands can be run on a site, or a series of sites, automatically, and — at the very least — inject huge dumps of worthless code into your database and — at worst — obtain database access and the ability to manipulate the data stored on your server. There are a few different ways you can protect yourself, your data and your event site against spam registrations.
The first option is the best solution and most recommended: Enable the mod_security module on your Apache installation. Most spam registrations come from bots or scripts that crawl a site looking for forms and fill them with data remotely (e.g. it’s not actually done by a human visiting your site, but a machine that is executing your code without ever actually hitting your site). The mod_security module protects your site against these kinds of remote submissions. If you do not have access to configure what Apache modules are enabled or disabled on your server, you might ask your webhost if it is possible to enable it. In my opinion, this should be on by default on all Apache servers (and IIS and nginx — which it also supports).
If enabling mod_security is not a possibility in your environment — either because you do not have access to your Apache configuration or your host is not able or willing to enable or install the mod_security package — you can use reCAPTCHA to require that attendees fill out a CAPTCHA form before their registration is recorded. reCAPTCHA is part of an initiative to digitize books, newspapers and radio recordings. Every time you enter a response in a reCAPTCHA form, you are helping the software identify real words that a computer was unable to read. Since the words that appear in a reCAPTCHA form have already failed sophisticated OCR technologies to translate them into text, spam bots aren’t likely to be able to read it, either, so you’re protecting your forms when you require a CAPTCHA for verification. While this can be arguably somewhat more annoying to the user, it will thwart any bot attempt to fill the form with garbage. For more information about how reCAPTCHA works, check out the reCAPTCHA site.
You can also use the Event Espresso WP User Integration plugin to make all your events member-only and require your users to log in using the built-in WordPress user registration system. Even if you do not have some form of human verification on your site’s registration process (this is not recommended, especially if you’re already getting hit by spam registrations), the additional step that a bot would need to go through of registering for a site, and then logging in before it is able to register for an event means that you are safeguarding your events against a potential attack by a script. The benefit of this over using reCAPTCHA is that there are a number of options in addition to reCAPTCHA in which user registrations must verify that they are not a bot by answering an admin-defined questions like “what color is the sky” or “what is two plus four” as opposed to trying to decipher a hard-to-read CAPTCHA image.
Event Espresso runs sanitization and data validation checks on all information that is stored in the database. This means that anything one of these scripts injects gets cleaned before being stored in the database, which, in turn, means that none of the data that gets dumped your system will be likely to cause any real damage to your site or expose any hidden passwords or personal information. However, dealing with a site that has been hit by thousands of fake user registrations can be tedious and time-consuming. Protect yourself, and your valuable time, by checking with your host about whether mod_security is enabled. If you are seeing registrations to your events that are obviously fake, take one of the precautions mentioned above and save yourself a lot of headache.
If you like to figure out how things work, enjoy discovering bugs (in software) like an entomologist, have a crush on WordPress, want to make a difference and be part of a great team then you should be the next Event Espresso Support Guru.
We looking for someone who will help us providing outstanding support to our customers. The work is a mix of educating customers, hunting down pesky software bugs, and testing new features. Every day you’ll help our customers understand our products and how to use them, and they’ll love you in return. A couple times a week you’ll get a message from a customer that exclaims: “You guys rock!”
The opportunity to work with a premier WordPress plugin company doesn’t come around every day, so apply today!
Primary Responsibilities
Provide both technical and customer support via forums, twitter, facebook, chat and email.
Create help documentation for the Event Espresso products.
Other projects and responsibilities as needed or assigned.
Key Skills & Qualifications:
Intermediate experience using WordPress plugins and themes.
Intermediate experience using Event Espresso plugins (or at least willing to quickly master our plugins).
Beginner/Intermediate PHP experience, particularly with the WordPress Codex.
Beginner/Intermediate MYSQL experience, particularly with respect to the WordPres Codex.
Beginner/Intermediate Jquery experience, particularly with WordPress themes.
Intermediate CSS experience, particularly with WordPress themes.
Must be able to work remotely with little to no supervision.
Must be available during the day, Monday through Friday.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills
Ability to be a team player and be patient with the team and customers.
This job is offered on either a freelance/contract basis.
We don’t mean to make the application process difficult, so please send an email to jobs@eventespresso.com briefly describing your experience with:
– WordPress
– HTML
– PHP
– MYSQL
– CSS
– Jquery
– Building/Supporting WordPress Plugins
– Providing customer and technical support
Please also include:
– Educational Attainment(s) (if applicable)
– Salary Requirements
– Employment History & Current Job (resume)
– Portfolio (if applicable)
Notes:
Salary: Depends on Experience
Primary Location: Utah or Anywhere in North America or Europe
Schedule: Full-Time
Working Hours (per week): varies, up to 40
EOO: Event Espresso is an Equal Opportunity Employer M/F/D/V
All positions are subject to close without notice.
This new version includes a new event search function, updates and several fixes.
New Feature
A simple auto complete search tool (uses [EVENT_SEARCH] shortcode) that searches the titles of events. The results are automatically displayed to the user as they type.
Available spaces limit set too low in functions/main.php
Fixes
Remove duplicate event category description display with pagination (Important Note: This affects the event_list.php file. This file will need to be updated if it is in the uploads/espresso/templates directory.)
Escape quotes in event title
Groupon menu item missing when R&P is active
Renaming the REM plugin folder before manually deactivating it breaks the event editor
[ESPRESSO_CART_LINK] shortcode cannot add more than one event to the cart
Multi Event Registration breaks when the coupon code box is turned on (Important Note: This affects the shopping_cart.php file. This file will need to be updated if it is in the uploads/espresso/templates directory.)
Ability to register for expired events in the shopping cart (Important Note: This affects the shopping_cart.php file. This file will need to be updated if it is in the uploads/espresso/templates directory.)
Fixes [EVENT_TIME] shortcode
Fatal error on attendee overview page if old ticketing add-on is installed
Missing bracket in venue shortcode markup
Free event condition not met
Broken[EVENT_PRICE] shortcode
WP User Integration 1.9.4
Fixes
Fixes require login for all events not working
Fixes autofilled fields are editable when set to not be editable
This release doesn’t include a lot of new features because we’re putting most our effort into version 3.2. We hope you enjoy the new search feature, and that these fixes make version 3.1 even better. A complete history of Event Espresso is available in the Change Log.
Event Espresso is a WordPress event registration and ticketing management plugin. Event Managers use Event Espresso to add event registration to their own website, lower costs, increase revenue and improve customer satisfaction. You can learn more about Event Espresso at https://eventespresso.com
The new calendar add-on is now available to download in the forums for registered users of the Personal license and above. Some of the new features include:
New calendar sidebar widget
Tool tip short descriptions (which support images in event descriptions)
Easy to use custom event category colors
Support for jQuery UI’s Themeroller
Custom color options
calendar thumbnail images
Update to the latest version of Event Espresso (3.1.24 or above) and the latest version of the Calendar add-on (2.0 or above). After activating, navigate over to the calendar settings page. You’ll be greeted with a brand new set of options to play with.
Some of the new features work with features you may have already been using. For example, the tooltips use the “display short descriptions” feature set in Event Espresso ? Template settings to display the full event description or just an excerpt. Be sure to use the <!--more--> tag in your event descriptions if you don’t want the full description to display in the tooltip.
You can also enable or disable thumbnail images in the calendar events.*
*Note: In some cases, images may appear cut off or overflow into the next row of dates. We are aware of the issues and are working on a new version that will resolve these issues. Please report any issues you have in the Calendar forums.
Another new feature is the ability to easily add colors to categories of events using a new color picker on the Categories page. In this way, you can easily change the event background and text colors in your calendar.
Calendar 2.0 also brings jQuery Themeroller to the calendar. If you’re unfamiliar with Themeroller, you can read up on the project page on the jQuery site. In short, it’s a framework for building (and using) themes that can be easily swapped in and out or changed and provides a much wider range of design possibilities than the default styles of the calendar or your theme. You can use one of the default themeroller themes (included with Event Espresso), create your own theme, or build one from the Themeroller site.
The Espresso Calendar is set for a rewrite later this year. We hope these new features will provide some exciting new features for your event site. Let us know how your using the new features on your site in the comments below! If you have any problems or questions, we encourage you to ask in the support forums and we’ll respond as quickly as possible.
We will be in attendance at the 
It can happen at any time. You’ve opened your event for registrations and you are suddenly inundated by obviously fake users and incomplete transactions. Spam is everywhere (and we don’t mean the food). It’s in your inbox, it’s in your comments, and it’s in your events.
You can also enable or disable thumbnail images in the calendar events.*
