Support

March 6, 2013 at 7:54 pm

Hi Eric, Seth asked me to jump in here because I recently just finished developing an EE Addon for 3.1 that we haven’t released yet that may do what your client wants. I’ll try to give an overview of how it works as it was made for a very specific use case (I developed it for a local conference where I live).

1. A “Main Event” is created which is the event that tickets are purchased for.
2. Create Event Categories for the different time slots (just name them accordingly, i.e. “9:30am – 10:30am” etc.)
3. In the Addon settings is a place to set what the main event is (registration ids from this event will be used to authorize and verify registration for breakout sessions). There is also a place where the user selects which event categories are used for session options.
4. Then the user creates events for all the sessions they are offering for the various breakouts. When creating the events they assign them to whatever breakout categories the session is offered (and it might be multiple “time slots”.
5. The user sets up a WordPress page and adds a special shortcode that will be where the breakout stuff gets generated. Then they get the url for that page and modify the confirmation emails for their main event so that it includes the registration id and a link to the breakout registration page.
6. When registrants visit the breakout registration page they are presented with a form to enter their registration id from the main event and the system validates that ID (makes sure it matches a registration AND that the number of breakout registrations using that id has not exceeded the tickets atttached to the id)
7. If validated, the attendee is presented with a simple form listing the time slots with a drop down of the events for each time slot that they can select from. The form also contains minimal information (First Name, Last Name, Email) and currently does NOT hook into the EE Questions/Answers system. It saves the data directly to the attendee table.
8. When the attendee submits their information they are presented with a summary of the “breakouts” they registered for and a simple text based email is sent to them to confirm their registration.

If you want you can view a walkthrough of the registration process and demo of “some” of the admin facing info that’s available in a video I made here -> http://youtu.be/WfJVWGr2-f8

Note, this is not a fully developed addon but was made for a specific use case. If you think this is something you could use for the client (with a few tweaks) let me know and I’ll throw it up on our git repo for you to look over.

March 7, 2013 at 1:06 pm

Re breakout inventory:

Actually, the current iteration assumes the same attendance limit for each “time slot” it would be attached to based off what is set as the attendee limit in the event setup. What the addon does is track registrations per time slot the event is attached to (event category). What this means that it does not allow for event managers to set different limits for each time slot.

RE Q&A:

Main event registration works as normal, so all EE stuff works as expected with the main event.

The other caveat. Currently the system is only setup to work with one main event. After the main event is done, a new main event can be set and new breakout categories but this is an important thing to keep in mind.

When I put this up on our github account it will probably initially be in our private repos you’ll have access to it when I put it up. I”m fairly busy today so don’t know if it’ll get up but I’ll try to do it before the end of the day.

March 11, 2013 at 10:21 pm

Darren is on vacation until next week but I’ll try to see if he can give you an update.