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mchoffy
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September 13, 2020 at 12:11 pm
Hello,
We are running an event that is custom scheduled, so the attendee would schedule an agreed date and time. Right now the we have in EE an event that lasts till the end of next year and attendees have to phone to schedule. This is not ideal.
Is there another way create an event without specifying dates and times?
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Tony
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September 14, 2020 at 5:46 am
Hi there,
All events within Event Espresso require a date and time at this time so the above (with an event set far into the future) is how you would need to do this within EE.
Can you provide more details on the user case here?
When users are phoning to schedule what info are they providing?
Could they not provide those details on the registration form and use the event as more of a ‘request to schedule event’?
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mchoffy
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September 14, 2020 at 5:10 pm
Hi Tony,
Say a client wants to book a private one on one consultation. The way I have it now is that they would need to call and speak to someone to schedule a date that is free. Then they go to the site to register and pay.
I think I am looking for a way for client to see availability on the website and then be able to register and pay. Sort of an event on demand.
I am open to other ideas.
Thanks Michael
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Tony
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September 15, 2020 at 8:55 am
Ok it sounds like you are looking more for an appointment/scheduling plugin rather than events as what I think you are looking for it the opposite to how events in EE work.
Meaning if you have an event on X date people book onto it and that date is available, but it sounds like you want all dates available until someone books onto it, right?
That would mean you would need to create events for each date available which then the user books onto to show no availability on that day, unless I’m misunderstanding what you are trying to do I can’t think of another way to do this with EE.
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mchoffy
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September 15, 2020 at 3:18 pm
Yes, I believe you are right about the appointment/scheduling. Thanks for your input. I will have to think about it.
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Bryan
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September 16, 2020 at 1:17 pm
We are trying to do something similar. Yes, it does seem like it would be more of ‘appointment booking,’ but that’s how we have to do things for now, because of COVID.
Our specific scenario is that we offer a lot of classes. In this instance, we have a ‘Make Your Own Canoe Paddle’ class. If Group A wants to take this class next week, fine. If Group B wants to take this class the week after that, that’s fine too. [Normally, we only offer this class twice per year, but due to COVID, we’re changing which classes we offer and how frequently]
Ideally, the registration form would include the names and info of participants, and their payment. Then we’d contact them to arrange the date/time for the class.
The reason to stay with Event Espresso is that all our classes and instructors are already in the system. A solution within EE would be ideal, but if that won’t work, we’ll be forced to look elsewhere.
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Tony
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September 17, 2020 at 4:07 am
My point about this being more of an appointment vs events issue isn’t that you shouldn’t be doing it but rather that Event Espresso has been designed around events you host which people then register onto and so it simply isn’t best suited for this set up.
Can it be used for this kind of set up? Sure, but there are limitations around it as what you are doing works the opposite way to how everything is stored in Event Espresso.
When you create an event it adds that event to the database and then everything related to that event all links back to it in some way or another. So for events you create the event to show a particular date is available and then people register onto it.
For appointments, you basically have availability everywhere and then you create ‘appointments’ to show that particular date has been taken so people can no longer book onto it (the the ‘booking’ of an appointment creates the row and that date is then excluded). Now obviously an appointment system would give you much more control over ‘availability’ in the first place allowing you to set specific dates in which there actually is some but again you can see works in the opposite way to how everything within Event Espresso core is stored.
(I’m using whole dates as an example here, it can be anything at all depending on the system. Minutes, hours, days, whatever)
Our specific scenario is that we offer a lot of classes. In this instance, we have a ‘Make Your Own Canoe Paddle’ class. If Group A wants to take this class next week, fine. If Group B wants to take this class the week after that, that’s fine too. [Normally, we only offer this class twice per year, but due to COVID, we’re changing which classes we offer and how frequently]
Ideally, the registration form would include the names and info of participants, and their payment. Then we’d contact them to arrange the date/time for the class.
I would love to be able to say ‘Great… you just need to do X within settings’ or ‘Then you need to create this setup and set Y up like this’ for something that would suit your use case but the short answer is I can’t for the reasons above. Anything I can give you on the here wouldn’t fit well or would be clunky at best and we simply can not rewrite Event Espresso to accommodate without proper planning (if we were to take on support for this setup). Planning, developing, testing, fixing, re-testing, supporting a new feature all takes time and right now we are heavily focused on a new event editor and a recurring events feature so even if we accepted this feature it wouldn’t even be discussed until the above were finished.
Right now, to get something that suits your needs you’ll need custom development. That custom development could hook into Event Espresso to allow you to use it for what you are looking to do, but the appointment(ish) side of it would need to be handled outside of Event Espresso.
For example, you could have a form (using a forms plugin outside of Event Espresso) which listed specific types of events and when the user selected a type and selected a date it checks the events that have been created within Event Espresso already and allow/disallows the submission based ‘availability’, you then receive the form and go from there (create an event, contract the user(s) etc). You could even hook in to create the event automatically and say set it for approval from the admin so that you could manually check the event and send the user over a link to register onto that event as they normally would now.
Again, all of the above would require custom development.
The reason to stay with Event Espresso is that all our classes and instructors are already in the system. A solution within EE would be ideal, but if that won’t work, we’ll be forced to look elsewhere.
Unfortunately as mentioned above, at its most basic level EE was not designed for open-ended scheduled events on the fly types of setups. I’m not saying it’s impossible to do because it very much is, but it’s going to take a lot of refactoring/custom code. Even if we agreed to support this setup it’s not something we can drop everything we are working on currently to switch over to so again would take a while.
There are other options to doing this (like the form mentioned above and I’m sure there are others) rather than something completely inside of Event Espresso but if you need something out of the box then EE isn’t a good fit right now.
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