Posts Tagged ‘event espresso’

Event Espresso Now Has Integration with AffiliateWP

Do you want to offer your attendees, customers, or other patrons an incentive to promote your events? Now you can! With our AffiliateWP Integration add-on for EE4, the process is quite simple.

AffiliateWP-Logo

AffiliateWP is an affiliate plugin for WordPress. With AffiliateWP, your affiliates can promote your products and services, which improves your website’s SEO rankings, drives more traffic to your site, and increases sales/revenue. Visit the AffiliateWP website to learn more.

Event Espresso’s integration with AffiliateWP allows your affiliates to promote your events from their websites. When someone visits your website by clicking one of your affiliates’ referral links, the affiliate receives credit for the visit. If that visitor purchases tickets to your event, then the AffiliateWP plugin marks that visit as a conversion and is queued for a commission payout.

The AffiliateWP plugin is required for this add-on to function.

Since there are no settings for the AffiliateWP Integration add-on for EE4, if you are already using the AffiliateWP plugin, accepting referrals for your events is as easy as installing and activating the add-on. Ticket sales are tracked when someone registers and pays for an event.

AffiliateWP Admin

Affiliate overview in WP Affiliate

 

For help setting up and using the AffiliateWP plugin, please see their documentation here. For documentation on the AffiliateWP Integration add-on, see here.

So, what do you think? We hope you are as excited about this new integration as we are. We feel it will help our customers promote their events and have even greater success with Event Espresso!

Get started today! Purchase the AffiliateWP Integration add-on for Event Espresso 4, also included in the EE4 Everything License.

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Espresso Bar Episode 6, Tuesday June 11

coffee-talk-2

The Espresso Bar will be back and broadcasting live next Tuesday, June 11. This month, your hosts will be Chris Reynolds, Garth Koyle and Event Espresso’s own support hero, Josh Feck.

Here is what we’ll be discussin:

  • Latest updates in Event Espresso 3.1.33 as well as the Calendar and MailChimp add-ons
  • Event Espresso 4 (Arabica) progress
  • Espresso Requirements Check plugin
  • Tools we use for internal (and external) communication
  • and more.

Be sure to come by at 10am MDT and hang out with us in our IRC channel via the embedded client on our site or in your own favorite IRC client (#eventespresso on Freenode) or send us your questions/comments on Twitter with the hashtag #EventEspresso. If you have any questions or topic ideas that you’d like us to discuss on the show, use the form below to send us your feedback, or if you’d like to be a guest on an upcoming episode of the Espresso Bar, send us your information and a little about yourself.

We’ll see you there!

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Espresso Bar Episode 5 will be Tuesday, May 14

coffee-talk-2

The fifth installment of our monthly hangout, Espresso Bar, will be tomorrow at 10am MDT (4PM UDT). Seth and Chris will  be talking about several new add-ons that are now available in the pre-release channel, new badge templates for the Ticketing add-on coming in 2.1 and the user experience improvement program. If you have questions for us or are interested in being a guest on the Espresso Bar, fill out the form below to send us your information.

As always, we’ll be taking questions via Twitter with the hashtag #EventEspresso. We look forward to seeing you there!

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Questions from Eric to Event Espresso

Eric asked Event Espresso some questions to answer on the Espresso Bar hangout. If you watched this morning’s hangout you would have heard some of them. Here are everyone’s complete responses:

1. What has been the biggest challenge for you personally at Event Espresso? (could be programming, staffing, customers, support, infrastructure, etc.)

Darren: Being a distributed team rocks and Google Hangouts has worked well. However, I still think our team would benefit from at least a once a year in person meet up where we can strategize and spend time together (which is another challenge b/c of costs for getting everyone together). That to me has been one of the bigger challenges.

Another challenge has been the time its taken to develop 4.0. Frankly, its taken so long because of the amount of change happening in the core code and its frustrating that for the majority of our customers they wont’ be able to really appreciate the changes right away because MOST of it is the actual way the code is structured. Developers will grok it but the average customer won’t. Customers won’t see the benefits until they start seeing the awesome things we can build now on top of this new codebase.

Finally, there just isn’t enough time in the day. We need 48 hour days 🙂

Michael: Trying to code as one. As one of the developers, it’s tough to stay coordinated with the other developers. We each naturally have our own strengths and styles, and it’s hard to keep that from creating a mass of messy, inconsistent, and buggy code. For example, we recently had an issue with deciding how we would be recording payments and payment attempts in EE4. I had written code that records all payment attempts, (for example, even failed payment attempts from paypal), and record whether they were successful, pending, or failed, etc. Another developer, Brent, had envisioned that payments basically only get recorded on successful receipt of funds, and had written a bunch of code around this concept. Basically, I was treating “payments” as attempts-to-pay, but Brent was treating them as real money received. We discussed it for several hours, asked a bunch of other team members’ opinions, etc. At the end of the day, however, Brent took the higher ground and simply decided to roll with my way of doing it, despite still not being in agreement. So not only was it difficult have our code play nicely together, but it was also difficult to not spend all our working day debating it (which is never a problem if you’re working on your own).

Having said how difficult it is trying to stay coordinated with the rest of the developers, it’s also a huge bonus. I’m learning lots from the other developers that I never would otherwise.

Dean: Most definitely it has been getting to grips with the internals of the plugin. Whilst support doesnt need the depth of knowledge that dev does, working for the most part alone it really benefits having a broader knowledge, but as the plugin is so big and complicated it has (and still is) taking some time.

Seth: From the very beginning, I think keeping up with everything that is going on, has been my biggest challenge. It was extremely hard to keep up with the feature requests, customizations, customer support, etc. when I first released the plugin and was working on everything by myself. That and Chris stepping back over the last few months 🙂

Chris: People-wrangling. As our team started growing beyond the early days 2 years or so ago — when it was mostly Seth, Garth and I — it’s been a constant challenge to go from the point of “okay, this is a great idea, let’s do it” to actually making that happen, and a lot of that involves checking in on people, making sure there are deadlines, the kinds of things that would be taken care of by a project manager which, at the time, we didn’t have. And then when that became my job I learned just how difficult it is to be a project manager and how much you need to be involved in just about everything. On the flip side, I’ve learned a lot from getting tired of trying to wrangle people and just said “fine, I’ll do it myself” and dug into the code to look at whatever was going on because no one else had time to do so.

Jonathan: Trying to transition from a corporate job to working with a software startup brings many challenges. But, my biggest challenge has been, obviously, getting up to speed with how the software works. I have to accept that I still have much more to learn. Learning something new everyday is what keeps it exciting for me.

Brent: I had joined Event Espresso somewhat spontaneously simply because I had used the product for a site I was developing for a client of my web design company, and really liked Event Espresso. I thought it would be a really great program to work on ( I was right ). However, I still had a fairly successful business rolling a long with work contracts in place to keep me going for a good portion of a year. I have been working full time for Event Espresso for about a year and a half now, while handling work from my other business on evenings and weekends. So basically working at least 60 hours a week. This has been very hard on my family and I as I do not get to spend enough time with them as I would like. It’s also beginning to take a nasty toll on my body in terms of back and arm pain. Who would have thought that too much mouse could cause so much pain!?!?! I’m currently on the edge of having my other business work significantly reduced as I finish off some long term contracts and pass off clients to other web development firms. It’s ALL EE from now on baby.

2. If you had it to do over again, how would your approach have changed.

Darren: Do what over again? I think maybe the biggest thing that might have changed from the perspective of EE, is our processes. We’ve implemented a lot of great systems and processes in the last 6 months that would have been a real benefit from the get go.

Dean: I honestly don’t know, maybe a more systematic approach on working out which bit connects to where.

Seth: I was a novice programmer when I started, and everything I have learned over the years, is a direct result of diving head first into the very early stages of Event Espresso. If I could start over, I would have learned how to be a better programmer, and learned how to do stuff the right way, including learning how to do things the “WordPress way”.

Chris: I think when I started at Event Espresso, I sort of assumed that Seth and Garth knew what they were doing. 🙂 So there were a lot of times where maybe I didn’t agree with something, but I assumed things were fine and they had figured it out already so I just kept quiet. I think taking initiative and getting involved earlier, and asking hard questions that demand answers could have helped us and the plugin overall. The truth is, when you start a business like this, particularly a plugin (or theme) business, you’re pretty much just making it up as you go. Sure there are things you can bring to the table that can help guide the trajectory — Garth’s a business school major, so, you know, there’s that, I go dizzy looking at spreadsheets with acronyms like ROI — and you can look at what other plugin and theme studios are doing, but really, you’re just guessing unless you’ve really had an in-depth conversation with those other guys.

Jonathan: I think I would change my learning approach. Instead of trying to learn bits and pieces of the plugin and add-ons, I would start with the core plugin and work my way out to the add-ons.

Brent: Hmmm.. for starters, I wish I could have joined the Event Espresso tEEm earlier, I wish I hadn’t had to work 60+ hours / week, and I wish I had been more knowledgeable about working with a distributed software development team and could have earlier affected some of the procedural changes we have now. As the EE tEEm grew, we learned (often the hard way) better ways to work on the product and to implement procedural policies that help to maintain the quality and robustness of our work. It would have been nice to have those policies in place without having to have experienced the problems that fostered their creation. But regardless, we have a great tEEm now and a methodology that is really allowing us to churn through the code, identify bugs and issues, and correct things before releasing anything to our customers.

3. What upcoming or new features are you most excited about?

Darren: I’m most excited about 4.0 of course! If I had to pick two systems I’m really keen on seeing come with 4.0 it would have to be:

a. Messages Framework (of course!) – I’m really excited about the potential for this framework to make possible a lot of cool features for EE users.
b. New Model structure. Brent initially worked on this but Michael has been ramping up some cool additions to the model codebase. These models provide some really efficient and easy way for interacting with EE data in the database.

Another thing that is a ways off yet, but I’m really looking forward to when we get there is the launch of a 3rd party marketplace for EE. I think this will bring some real value for our customers (and developers building on top of EE!) and I can’t wait to see what people build for EE on our new codebase.

Dean: 4.0 (of course!), there are just so many changes to the underlying code that will make Event Espresso a much more flexible and extendible product. It will be a bit of a system shock for most users, but once that has passed I believe strongly that everyone will benefit.

Seth: I am most excited about Event Espresso Arabica and all of the new features we have planned in the coming months.

Chris: I’ll say the same thing as everyone else in that I’m excited for Arabica. I’m excited to see the direction it goes, and I’m excited to see what people do with it, and I’m excited to start digging in and seeing what I can do with it, too. I really haven’t done much testing or digging into the code yet, so whenever Brent or Darren start talking about the cool stuff they’re working on, or I read what they’re talking about on IRC I get that sort of “lemme see lemme see” kid in a candy shop reaction.

Jonathan: Arabica, of course! It is where we are focusing our attention the most right now, so it’s on everyone’s mind constantly. Cleaner code, hooks, filters, etc. It will definitely be a breath of fresh air for the community.

Brent: I have been spearheading a rewrite of Event Espresso to convert it to an Object Oriented Programming (OOP) codebase that will better allows us to develop new functionality and features as we move forward. As well, we are converting most of the main elements that our system deals with (events, venues, people, etc) into WordPress Custom Post Types to make Event Espresso even more accessible to the general WordPress community. So far, the road has been long and hard, but when this is done, there is going to be an explosion of new possibilities with Event Espresso. New features, new addons, new third party development, and hopefully new markets and new uses of Event Espresso that we hadn’t even thought of. Can’t wait.

If you didn’t catch us live, you missed a great show. You can watch the replay on our Espresso Bar Archive page.

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Happy Birthday Event Espresso! (save 20%!)

Event Espresso Birthday

We love big events, right!? Well, this week, and through the end of April, we are celebrating Event Espresso’s 4th birthday. Yes, we are celebrating our birthday for 2 weeks! Details in a moment…

It has been a wild ride over the last four years, and we are stronger than ever. This year is looking to be the best yet! Our “tEEm” is growing, the plugin is more solid than ever, and 2013 is forecasted to be a rocking year for WordPress.

We want to thank YOU, our loyal customers for helping us remain the premiere event registration plugin for WordPress. We would also like to thank the WordPress community as a whole for being such an awesome community to allow us to do what we love; and that is to help you make your events a huge success.

To celebrate Event Espresso’s birthday, we are offering a 20% discount on all license packages, as well as add-ons. Just use the code HAPPYBIRTHDAY at checkout to celebrate with us!

We hope 2013 has been, and will continue to be, your best year yet!

What are you waiting for? Let the festivities begin! Click here to purchase Event Espresso using the 20% off discount code.

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Event Espresso pre-release channel

We are happy to officially announce a new feature for Event Espresso users that we quietly rolled out on the website a couple weeks ago: the Event Espresso pre-release channel.

What’s the Event Espresso pre-release channel?

pre release channel downloads

Pre-release channel downloads

The pre-release channel is where we post early versions of Event Espresso and any add-ons for user testing. Since we are just barely rolling this new feature out and switching to a new development schedule all at the same time, the first couple versions we released on the pre-release channel were still very early in the testing. However, our new development cycle goes into effect with the release of 3.1.30, which will include a full month of testing by the support team. After we’ve gone through our testing (the alpha stage), we will post the plugin to the pre-release channel. These should be considered solid release candidates that you can use on your live site, but if you are still nervous, you can hold back, stick with the stable version, which will have had a month of beta testing on the pre-release channel. Any bugs that come up during the beta period (via your testing on the pre-release channel) will be addressed before the final release of Event Espresso.

The great part about the pre-release channel is that it installs into a separate directory on your site, so if there are any issues, you can just switch back to the stable version after reporting the issue.

We need your feedback! We are hard at work on the next version of Event Espresso, and we’d like you to take it out for a spin. When you test out a pre-release edition of Event Espresso you can:

  • Help test the upcoming software release against a wide variety of server environments and WordPress installations
  • Get a heads up on new features
  • Ensure that your customizations will work with the very latest software
  • Influence how the final product will look and function
  • Help contribute to a more stable final product
  • Try out new add-ons before they are officially released

Where to download

If you log into your Event Espresso account page and scroll down to the downloads section and you will see a new checkbox (tickbox) for signing up to the Pre-release channel. You can tick that and agree to the waiver and the Pre-release items will appear in a box below your regular downloads.

Pre-Release Toggle

We have set a waiver in place because we may also be using this space for new, experimental products that may not be fully stable, however, again Event Espresso core and the current add-ons will have gone through testing by our support staff before being posted to the pre-release channel. Full details can be found in the Pre-release documentation.

How to report bugs and give feedback

If you notice anything that isn’t working please report it in the Pre-release forum. There will be a new thread for each major point release.

We will be posting the beta version of 3.1.30 to the pre-release channel today with a planned release of Monday. That means you can get started with the next version a few days early and let us know in the forums if there are any problems.

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Template changes in Event Espresso 3.1.28

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?

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Custom Post Types and Recurring Events Coming to Version 3.0.17

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

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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How do you save $30,000 on your WordCamp registrations?

Save Cash for WordCamp

Keep the Cash Campaign

This weekend we had the opportunity of attending WordCamp Utah. For those who haven’t attended a WordCamp, it’s a great opportunity to be inspired by and network with skilled developers, writers, webmasters, and entrepreneurs. We even had a town hall meeting with WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg and a live presentation from Will it Blend, yeah, seriously! Needless to say, we had a great time.

Even though we had a great time at WordCamp, there was a $30,000 problem that really bothered us. Each of the 153 attendees had to pay an additional $1.49 to cover the cost of registering for WordCamp through Eventbrite. With all the plugin development around WordPress, why would WordCamp not use Event Espresso to manage their events? Event Espresso only costs $59.95 for unlimited events, and no fee per registrant (compare that to $1.49 per registrant with Eventbrite). WordCamp could either use that $1.49 for cool WordCamp things, or they could give us all a discount.

There have been or will be 136 WordCamps in 2010 and if, on average, each WordCamp gets about the same number of attendees as WordCamp Utah, attendees could collectively pay $30,396 just to register for WordCamps! That could fund the development of a sweet new feature or theme or be used to publicize WordPress as a CMS. Developers can help their clients save more money too by using Event Espresso.

To help make WordCamp better, and save a lot of cash, we have decided to donate our event manager plugin, Event Espresso, to every WordCamp site. We do not want to see all that money go toward just registration fees – we’d like to see WordCamp use that money to make it better or let us all keep the cash. We’re here to help you  manager your events better, so if you’re in charge of planning or hosting a WordCamp, contact us to get your free event manager plugin.

You too should make more money from your events, or make them more affordable with Event Espresso.

Put a Banner on Your Site:

Save the Cash Campaign 125x125

Save the Cash Campaign 125x125

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Save the Cash Campaign 234x60

Save the Cash Campaign 468x60

Save the Cash Campaign 468x60

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Save the Cash Campaign 728x90

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Announcing Event Espresso 3

Announcing Event Espresso 3.0

Announcing Event Espresso 3.0., the most complete registration and event manager plugin available for WordPress. Brand new features and enhancements to nearly every feature makes this version the most powerful event management available with WordPress. Download Event Espresso 3.0 and do more with your events.

New Features:

Download Event Espresso 3.0 and get the most advanced WordPress event management system.

The First 100 Save $10
For the first 100 shoultes.net and Event Espresso subscribers, use the discount code 3SPR3550 during checkout and save $10.

Affiliates Earn 20%
Earn 20% by helping other event mangers understand the power of Event Espresso by becoming an affiliate.

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Event Espresso