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Posted by Seth Shoultes on Wednesday, February 23rd, 2011
We are very happy to announce that we have begun development on a new iPhone and Android app to scan tickets at the door. If you are using our QR Code ticketing addon. This will be an innovative new way (for Event Espresso users) to check-in attendees at the door.
Update: iPhone/iPod and Android Apps Now Available.
More information coming soon! If you would like to support the development and get the app and ticketing system at up to 50% off, please let us know.
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Posted by Garth on Tuesday, December 21st, 2010
Development on Event Espresso continues and we wanted to give our event managers a sneak peek of the new event admin coming in version 3.0.18. This may be replacing the Attendees/Payments page and Event Setup pages. These two pages will be combined into one “Event Overview” page where you can click to add a new event or view all the information (previously available on two pages.)
We’ve added the following event management options:
- Quick Filtering Options – all current events, today’s events, and this month’s events
- Advanced Filtering Options – month/year, categories, and active/inactive status
- Improved Column Sorting
- Event Start Dates and Times
- Registration Start Date and Times
- Actions – view event (magnifying glass icon), edit event (edit icon), view attendees (people icon), view shortcodes (<> icon), export excel (excel icon), export csv (csv icon), and send event newsletter (mail icon).
Here is a comparison of the new version (on the left) with the current version (on the right)
Event Manager Admin Comparison Dec. 2010
Here is a closer view of the new event manager admin.
Event Manger New Admin, Version 3.0.18
We believe this new design, will make Event Espresso more convenient and efficient for event managers, than ever before.
What do you think? Any additional suggestions?
14 Comments
Posted by Garth on Thursday, December 16th, 2010
WordPress Calendar
If your organization has events, and your website is powered by WordPress, you’ve probably been looking for a WordPress calendar plugin to list your events. You need to make it easy for your customers to find your upcoming events, and that’s what a WordPress calendar does. The Event Espresso WordPress calendar plugin includes month, week, and day views and you can customize the WordPress calendar to fit your site’s style by editing the CSS style sheet. You can display events that span several days, recurring events, and you can color code your category of events so a customer can easily read your calendar and know which events they are most interested.
The power of a WordPress calendar really kicks in when customers can also buy a ticket for your upcoming events – that’s where Event Espresso comes in handy. With Event Espresso, you can list all your events on your WordPress calendar and facilitate your customers to register for your events, right from your WordPress website. Collect and store the information of your registrants, collect payments, send confirmation emails, and even create spill-over events if your one event gets full. You can create seating limits, custom registration pages to ask the questions you need and so much more.
When you are looking for a WordPress calendar, we hope that you’ll recognize that your calendar can be more than a calendar page of events. Your WordPress Calendar, when integrated with Event Espresso, can facilitate your event registration (let people buy tickets to your events), and you can be more profitable.
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Posted by Garth on Thursday, December 9th, 2010
Yesterday, the radio program, Marketplace by American Public Media published an article on their website and ran a story on the radio about how charities and nonprofit organizations are using social media to raise funds. It is becoming ever more important for organizations, especially nonprofit groups, to take advantage (in a good way) of the opportunities they have. Social media allows organizations to make personal connections with many more people who are interested in their mission or cause than is available via other forms of media.
When I heard this story, it became very apparent that nonprofit organizations need to be on the cutting-edge of technology and use it to its full potential. We hope you will take advantage of the great features and capabilities of Event Espresso. You can do more than just manage your events, you can even use it as a volunteer management system on WordPresCreate events as assignments and allow your volunteers to signup for the assignments you create. This will help keep your volunteers engaged and advocates for you and your cause. We want to be sure you have the tools you need to be successful and Event Espresso has great social media integration for facebook and a Group on add-on. Event Espresso and these tools will help you take advantage of the social media’s potential.
There should be very little doubt in your mind about the power of social media. You should be very confident that your organization should be engaging in social media and be prepared with the tools to make the interactions you have a positive experience.
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Posted by Garth on Wednesday, December 8th, 2010
We’d like to announce the most advanced version of Event Espresso. Version 3.0.17 makes improvements upon the existing features and paves the way for new ones. See the release notes for complete details and upgrading.
Some of the Important Improvements in 3.0.17
Event Espresso Calendar
- A rewritten registration system to allow for easier customization.
- A rewritten payment gateway system to allow for additional payment gateways.
- Added a custom email manager to create customized emails for use in multiple events.
- Added support for custom post types and shortcodes for posts.
- Enabled multiple post categories in edit_event.php
- Added support for the Recurring Events Manager addon.
- Added address2 field for event the address.
- Updated the event_espresso_get_price function to include early pricing in the display.
- Fixed coupon system on the attendee list page.
- Fixed the /templates/return_payment.php file.
- Added the espresso_event_category_data($event_id) function to get the category details of an event.
- Added a “Secondary” status to to events. This will allow events to be set up as a secondary status for use as overflow or waiting list events.
- Fixed some style issues in admin styles.css
- Added an export all attendees (for all events) button.
- External Registration URLs. Can be used to link to external websites or registration pages.
See the release notes for complete details and upgrading.
Screenshots:
Create a Custom Post
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Custom Post Type Editor
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Calendar Week View
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List of Attendees
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Movie Listings (in Custom Files Addon)
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See the release notes for complete details and upgrading.
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Posted by Garth on Tuesday, December 7th, 2010
Organize Events and Volunteers with Event Espresso
You’ll notice that not-for-profit organizations often have a following of people who are interested in their cause and who are eager to be involved, but what you will also notice is that those organizations do very little with that small army of volunteers. If you’ve ever participated in the same community service project or an event for a non-profit organization more than once, you’ll see a lot of new faces that weren’t at the first event you attended. It is becoming increasingly important for non-profit organizations to be active in their mission and communities to keep their membership/advocates active and to continue to recruit other volunteers/advocates. Non-profit success is becoming more instantaneous and driven by how much help they can get from their participants. Event Espresso helps non-profits, or any organization for that matter, organize these people who care about their cause and want to get involved. We do have a list of a few of the non-profit organizations who are using Event Espresso and you can see how it has helped them organize their events, manage their volunteers, and collect revenue to support their mission and operations.
But you don’t have to just organize people into a formal event. To augment your formal events and keep your volunteers involved, you can also use Event Espresso to organize people into group and assignments. Here is an example of how Event Espresso can go beyond managing your formal events to managing your non-profit volunteer’s efforts.
Example scenario:
Let’s imagine we have a not-for-profit organization with the mission to improve the literacy rate among children in foster care.
We plan to achieve this mission by accomplishing three main objectives: 1) increasing the access to books for children in foster care, 2) increasing the frequency and length that foster parents read to/with their foster children, 3) recruiting an advocate in each public school facility that will champion this effort in their school and in their area.
- To increase the access that foster children have to books, we’ve decided to do a community book drive to collect books for the school and local libraries. With this activity you will need people to volunteer to spread the word either by going door-to-door or by taking fliers into the community, blogging about the book drive, and even get people to collect the books and deliver them to the library. You can use Event Espresso by creating events for each of these activities and asking people to sign up for them. You can set limits on the events/assignments to make sure that everyone is assigned to where you need them and that your efforts aren’t overlapped. You’ll also have people organized into groups that you can send subsequent communication.
- To increase the frequency/length that foster parents and children read together we are planning a read-in, where parents and children will go to the local library to 1) obtain library cards, 2) check out three books, and 3) read at least one book together while at the library. The read-in will also include a reading competition that people can register for on your website, with recognition for the highest achievers. With people pre-registering for the read-in, Event Espresso can help you gauge the volume of participation even before the read-in event, market to those who sign up and remind them to work toward their goals, and even evaluate how much of an impact you might have in the community with this event.
- To recruit an advocate in each public school we are going to speak with the attendees to our read-in event and try to recruit participants. With the easy sign-up form or even manual registration features of Event Espresso, each of your advocates at the library can register on your site for another event and thereby organize people into another group. You can then communicate directly with this group and create future events/assignments for them to commit to do.
This is just a simple example of all the great ways you can use Event Espresso to manage your events on WordPress. Non-profit organizations can use Event Espresso to bring in revenue from their golf tournaments, service projects, etc. but they can use it to organize their volunteers and staff. Create an event/assignment that people can sign up for and let this great software do the heavy work of managing your volunteer efforts.
Are these ideas new to you, or have you started to harness the complete power of Event Espresso? What novel ways have you found to use Event Espresso? I hope I’ve inspired you.
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In addition to supporting their mission Event Espresso also offers a discount to non-profit organizations. If you are a non-profit organization and would like to use Event Espresso to manage your events, please complete the Non-profit Discount form. If you’re a non-profit organization and you’re already using Event Espresso, we’d love to hear what it has done for you. If you don’t have a website or if it’s not built on WordPress (a content management system), let us know and we can help you understand the process to having an inexpensive website with these capabilities.
6 Comments
Posted by Seth Shoultes on Thursday, December 2nd, 2010
This is our 3rd WordCamp sponsorship in the past year! I grew up in Phoenix, Arizona. So I am truly honored to be a part of WordCamp Phoenix.
In 2011, WordCamp Phoenix will be a multi-day event held all over Greater Phoenix, including free workshops, a full-day conference with four tracks, a day just for WordPress developers and networking opportunities for all.
WordCamp is organized and run by unpaid volunteers, underwritten by sponsors, and profit free. Remaining funds are donated to local charities. Since I am coming a little to the game, our sponsorship funds are going directly to one of the local charities.
Follow all the happenings of WordCamp Phoenix on Twitter via the #wcph hash tag. We’ll see you there…and follow us on Twitter to watch for discount to WordCamp Phoenix attendees.
1 Comment
Posted by Seth Shoultes on Thursday, November 18th, 2010
Premium Membership Only $5 a Month for a Limited Time!
- Get access to cutting edge updates, before anyone else
- Hands on tutorials and sample code
- Access to videos (in December)
- Event Espresso Members can now get access to live support and Q&A (when available) in the forums
2 Comments
Posted by Garth on Tuesday, October 26th, 2010
Modern technology can make a plane takeoff, fly and even land all by itself, but yet some event managers and web masters are manually managing their events! In the early 1900’s, inventors and engineers figured out the autopilot system. Now, in the early 2000’s, the inventors and engineers of Event Espresso have designed a system to make events open and close registration all by itself – setting them to autopilot.
The new Recurring Events Manager add-on for Event Espresso and WordPress gives webmasters, authors, publishers and event managers the freedom to schedule their events on a daily, weekly, monthly or yearly schedule and to step away from the wheel. With Event Espresso, all you have to do is add the event details once, and then schedule the event to happen again when you’d like it to. The events will automatically show up on your site when registration opens and registration will close automatically when you’ve scheduled it to close.
In a future release of this incredible add-on, you’ll be able to create a custom recurring schedule that is not based on a predictable schedule. Instead you could create an event to happen at on a Tuesday, then a Wednesday, then a Sunday or one week later or 3 days later or 38 days later, etc. and the system will take care of the rest. Bring your event technology into the 21st century with the Event Espresso Recurring Events Manager Add-on for WordPress.
There is no reason you should spend so much time managing your events. If you spend more than one hour even worrying about opening and closing the registration for your events, then you’re wasting your time and money. The cost of this add-on is an investment to make you more productive by saving you time and money. Saving you time and earning you more money, that’s the power of Event Espresso and the new Recurring Events Manager plugin for WordPress.
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Posted by Seth Shoultes on Friday, October 22nd, 2010
The last month has been insanely busy. I have been adding new features, fixing bugs, and working late every night to bring the best of WordPress to Event Espresso.
This is probably going to be the most exciting version of Event Espresso to date.gfg Version 3.0.17 will bring us custom post types for events and the very much anticipated Recurring Events Manager.
Event Development Framework
Event Development Framework
A very new and exciting feature in WordPress 3.0 is the ability to create custom post type, that is maintained in the WordPress posts table. This can help developers to build a theme that relies less on custom fields and makes it easier for clients.
The custom post type integration in Event Espresso will bring all kind of customization possibilities to your events. Allowing website owners and event professionals to harness the full power of WordPress and Event Espresso by using the premiere Event Development Framework for WordPress.
Our comprehensive Event Development Framework takes full advantage of WordPress using custom fields, post metadata, categories, tags, and taxonomies. You can even create pages or posts for each event that can be integrated into any theme within minutes.
Recurring Events Manager
This is probably one of the most anticipated addons of Event Espresso. For months I have received at least three emails a day inquiring about recurring events.
Well it is finally here! The Recurring Events Manager addon will bring the possibility to put your event registration system on auto-pilot.
This is going to be a huge benefit to anyone that has many of the same events throughout the year. Start by creating an event, then just tell the system how many days, weeks, or months you want the event to extend into the future. Events created using the Recurring Events Manager will auto-post on the registration start date and close when the registration date has passed or the event has been filled. That way you can continue to spend more time enjoying life.
Overview
For an up to date overview of all the recent changes to Event Espresso, be sure to view the change log.
View all of the available shortcodes and variables that will be available in version 3.0.17.
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