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October 4, 2012 at 12:08 pm

Hi Dino,

We have discussed this and will be extending the seating chart in the future. Probably after Event Espresso 3.2 is officially released early next year.

In my experience, the best way to handle a circular layout, and you probably already know this, is to clearly define the sections in the CSV/Excel document so that they match the image as best as possible. In your case I would start with “North Section” and end with the “West Section”.

I hope that helps.

P.S. As you move forward on this project, we would love to hear any feedback you can provide. That way we can make this thing even better for you in the future, as well as help other users accomplish similar layouts 🙂

Thanks!

October 6, 2012 at 9:19 pm

Dino,

Can you please send me the csv or excel file you are trying to upload, so I can play around with it? Also, do you mind if I login to the site and take a look at the seating chart settings etc?

Please send WordPress admin level log in credentials via the contact form on this page: https://eventespresso.com/contact/

Select the “I am sending login info as requested” department form.

October 8, 2012 at 3:22 pm

Dino —

So one idea I had after looking at your source and the existing seating chart pulls in the concept of “placeholder” seats that was added in towards the end and we don’t really have much/any documentation on it (not that we have any documentation on the seating chart anyway). Basically placeholder seats are seats that are just taking up space but aren’t actually displayed in the seating chart. They’re used in instances where you have 2 less seats in your back row than the row in front of it, so you want to display those so they are not left-aligned by default. So your two rows would be something like this (where [o] is a regular seat and [x] is a placeholder):

[o] [o] [o] [o] [o] [o]
[x] [o] [o] [o] [o] [x]

Get the idea?

So for your seating chart, what I’m thinking is you have 3 sections (left, center, right — or named whatever you want) and you can either have 3 levels (north, stage, south — or whatever) or you can have them all on one level.

In either option, your top and bottom left sections are going to be all placeholders. Your stage section is going to be all placeholders as well. You don’t need to worry about the top and bottom right sections because all the placeholders are doing is tweaking the display anyway, and you don’t want to add more work than you need to.

To make a “placeholder” seat, just add “placeholder” in the custom tag column in the CSV. In all other respects, it acts like a normal seat with a row and seat and section number — but on the front end it’s just an empty space.

You can also use the “reserved” tag if you have seats that are not available for sale that you want to indicate on the seating chart.