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New to Event Espresso – Few Questions

Posted: July 27, 2012 at 2:07 am

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Leviathan

July 27, 2012 at 2:07 am

Hi There,

I purchased an Event Espresso business licence earlier after being very impressed by the product brief.

I intend to use Event Espresso on a live music venue website to handle tickets (display the gigs, allow the customer to purchase tickets for it, either print the tickets or e-tickets, and for event espresso to handle stock levels etc.).

I’ve installed the plugin along with the Ticketing, Calendar and Social module.

I’ve been using Gigpress to handle our live show listing page thus far and it’s been doing it very well. It shows:

DATE – BAND NAME DESCRIPTION TICKET PRICE – AGE LIMIT – DOOR TIME – BUY TICKET

All the this info/the shows are displayed in a large list on the domain.com/whats-on page and the user can click the BAND NAME field to gain access to the Blog post associated with the listing which is basically the product page (format: domain.com/whats-on/band-name-date.html).

The “Buy Tickets” link simply directs the user to a third party ticket processor. This is the reason I have purchased Event Espresso – To bring the handling and sales of tickets inhouse.

I was a little confused by this “Event Registration” term you were using with this product but felt that I wouldn’t be required to use this.

However, upon setting up a test page it appears the listings page for Event Espresso is the /event-registration page it generates. Is this correct?

Is this the page that I’d need to modify to present my list of shows coming up as I have currently on our site?

An example of what I am looking to achieve is something like this: http://i46.tinypic.com/ju8wtt.jpg

I added a single event to Event Espresso and it shows as the following on the event/registration page:

BAND NAME Price Date Available Spaces Register

I’m assuming the “Register” option (which presents a form at the bottom of the event page/product page) is the user registration form that creates the customer account that allows them to continue with ticket checkout?

I tried to use this but after entering the First Name, Last Name and Email it just takes me to a blank page with the heading “Event Registration”. No email is despatched to the user, no record is created within WordPress etc.

So as above my 4 main questions are:

1) Can I achieve a simple list of shows, formatted similarly to the screenshot I attached? If so, is this functionality available out-of-the-box or is it going to need to be a totally custom solution?

2) The “Registration” option – Is this in effect the facility used for the customer to create an account to purchase tickets?

3) If the Registration option is indeed where a customer creates an account, does the customer need to create a new account every time they want to buy tickets on the site? As if they access the event-registration page currently, it simply presents that “Registration Details” form below the listing every time?

4) Is it possible to remove this Registration Details / Personal Information form off the event page and just have a “Buy Tickets” option? Or perhaps have a more elegant checkout system where they perhaps just add the tickets to a shopping cart and continue through like a shopping cart?

Thanks,

Tom

  • This topic was modified 12 years, 5 months ago by Leviathan.


Chris Reynolds

  • Support Staff

July 27, 2012 at 3:38 pm

Tom —

There are a couple ways you can handle what you are trying to do, and I’ve got some questions before we get into the specifics.

The first question is, what is your “Buy tickets” link now? Is it just a link you create within the post as you write it? Because if so, the easiest solution would be to hide the /event-registration/ page from the navigation, and just change that link to be the direct url to the event registration page for that event.

The other option I see is, when you create an event, you use the create a post option at the bottom of the Add New Event page to create a blog post at the same time. Then your post becomes the registration page for that event (or at least one way to register). Then you don’t need to worry about the “Buy Ticket” link at all because you’d have a registration form right on the page.

I tried to use this but after entering the First Name, Last Name and Email it just takes me to a blank page with the heading “Event Registration”. No email is despatched to the user, no record is created within WordPress etc.

Check your page settings. It sounds like you don’t have your pages set up correctly.
https://eventespresso.com/wiki/setting-up-event-espresso/#page

1) Can I achieve a simple list of shows, formatted similarly to the screenshot I attached? If so, is this functionality available out-of-the-box or is it going to need to be a totally custom solution?

There are some table layouts included in the custom files add-on (part of what you get in your Business License) that can do a layout similar to that. You’d still need to do some amount of customization to get all the info in the format you want, but it wouldn’t necessarily be 100% custom.

3) If the Registration option is indeed where a customer creates an account, does the customer need to create a new account every time they want to buy tickets on the site? As if they access the event-registration page currently, it simply presents that “Registration Details” form below the listing every time?

They need to enter their info every time UNLESS you want to use the WP User Integration add-on. In that case, you’d need to get them to register for the site, but once they do, their name and email address will autofill (if they’re logged in) when they are registering for an event.

4) Is it possible to remove this Registration Details / Personal Information form off the event page and just have a “Buy Tickets” option? Or perhaps have a more elegant checkout system where they perhaps just add the tickets to a shopping cart and continue through like a shopping cart?

Right now it’s not possible to entirely remove the Name & Email address fields, because those are used for payment and registration notification/confirmation. Also, removing those would make it impossible to know — if you’re using the ticketing app — how they got the ticket or who the ticket was registered to. You can require no info for additional attendees, but you need at least that information for the primary attendee for record-keeping and payment. 3.2 will introduce a more elegant, cart-based checkout.


Garth

  • Support Staff

July 27, 2012 at 3:47 pm

Hi Leviathan,

The /event-registration page is a the default page with the [espresso_events] shortcode. You can change the name of the page, or use a different one, but you do have to have a page with that shortcode and it has to be publicly viewable. That page is also the default listing page. You can customize the CSS to just about any layout: https://eventespresso.com/wiki/put-custom-templates/ but you’ll want to use the Custom Files Addon to do that so you don’t modify the core code. The Custom Files Addon aslo has some templates as seen with this customer (they still made some additional modifications): http://www.logikalprojects.com/training/courses/ or http://vividyogaandwellness.com/class-schedule/

With regard to testing the registration process, what is the website you’re doing this? I went to bogiez.com and can’t find your registration page to test the settings. Also, who created your theme? Sometimes this can happen when the theme is not processing jquery correctly or the theme has other code that isn’t following the WP standards.

In answer to your questions:

1) Can I achieve a simple list of shows, formatted similarly to the
screenshot I attached? If so, is this functionality available
out-of-the-box or is it going to need to be a totally custom solution?

You will need to customize your theme to your desired specifications, preferrably with the custom files addon

2) The “Registration” option – Is this in effect the facility used for
the customer to create an account to purchase tickets?

Yes, the registration page is the process for someone to register for an event and make a payment

3) If the Registration option is indeed where a customer creates an
account, does the customer need to create a new account every time
they want to buy tickets on the site? As if they access the
event-registration page currently, it simply presents that
“Registration Details” form below the listing every time?

If you use the WP User Integration addon the people with accounts on your website and are logged-in will have some of the registration fields automatically filled in so it’s even easier for them to register and make a payment.

4) Is it possible to remove this Registration Details / Personal
Information form off the event page and just have a “Buy Tickets”
option? Or perhaps have a more elegant checkout system where they
perhaps just add the tickets to a shopping cart and continue through
like a shopping cart?

You can use the Multiple Eventes Registration to display the Add to Cart function and then people can checkout with multiple events at once. We display this on the test-drive site too: https://eventespresso.com/testdrive/


Leviathan

July 29, 2012 at 12:16 pm

Thank you both for the replies, much appreciated.

I am currently testing this off-site so it’s not publically accessible right now.

I definitely have a better understanding now.

What I’m going to start with is trying to get the main listing page (which I hope to display all of our shows in a table format) to look as I want it. Once I’ve got this working, I’ll look at the other things I need to do.

Regarding the contents of the template examples within the custom add-on package – For example, “event_list_table.php” – How exactly do I use the contents of this?

I note[EVENT_CAT_DATE_MAX_DAYS max_days="30" event_category_id="sailing3"] shortcode within the file – Am I meant to be using a shortcode to pull the theme layout into the main listing page of Event Espresso? I did try that shortcode for example and it just generates

> Viewing all member only reservation times for the next 10 days. Event > Date Start Time Description Open Spots Register Link Boat Captain?

Which appear to be the tables column titles. None of my shows data is displayed on the page when using that shortcode though.

I appreciate I’ll need to customise the file to suit my needs (and the values such as “Boat Captain” are obviously just there as an example) but am I customising the theme file directly or am I copying and pasting it’s contents into another file to apply the layout to the listings page then editing it?

I’d like to be able to take the layout contained within that file and see all my shows I’ve added to Event Espresso rendered using the layout that file offers. From there I can make some sense of it!

Also, regarding the use of Multiple Events Registration – I checked the demo out and can see the Add Cart option. The title of the this plugin confuses me though – I just want the customer to have the option to use the Add to Cart option on a single show as standard (as most of the time a customer is only going to want to buy tickets for one show at a time). Does this allow that or is it going to expect a customer to buy tickets for multiple shows (as it’s name suggests)?

Tom

  • This reply was modified 12 years, 4 months ago by Leviathan.
  • This reply was modified 12 years, 4 months ago by Leviathan.
  • This reply was modified 12 years, 4 months ago by Leviathan.


Josh

  • Support Staff

July 30, 2012 at 11:01 am

You would need to replace the “sailing3” category with the category that the shows are assigned to. If you’re going to use the event_list_table.php template, make the modifications directly to that file. It’s a template that’s included as an example, so modify it as you see fit.

The Multi Event Registration add-on serves the purpose of allowing tickets for two different shows to be purchased under the same transaction. It will still work if someone only buys tickets for one event.

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