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Luc Desmarais
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March 30, 2014 at 6:14 pm
I am doing volunteer work on a WordPress site for a friend’s community yoga offering. I understand I.T., but am not a developer and have fairly limited experience with WP (ie: first site). I have been looking for a user-friendly booking tool that could help with the management/planning of classes. The classes are held in various locations (ex: a private homes, city centers); wherever there is space available for a certain number of people. This means that new places should be added over time. We then match that location with an available teacher that will now manage that particular class.
I have been looking around for a tool and have seen some fairly pricey commercial solutions. These are out-of-range for our little community offering , and am not sure it even covers what we need. I came across your WP Plugin and wondered if this could fit our needs.
Could you please confirm which of the following features would be available and the cost for the product or necessary add-ons to best meet our needs. Here are the key features we are looking for:
1) Calendar of classes, ideally available so that it can be presented by :
– all locations within a geographical area (or “category” or other means) for the users to see what is in their vicinity.
– teacher names so that users can see the schedule of classes for their preferred style/teacher.
– day/date and time for users that have specific availability and don’t mind getting to a class offered at the right time.
2) The locations need to have a descriptive of the place , a picture, some accessibility explanations and the ability to manage/restrict the total number of bookings to account for limited capacity.
– capacity would be either available, all booked, or (if possible) register for a wait-list in cases of cancellations.
– Google map integration for directions would be great since classes may have to change venues at times.
3) Anyone willing to provide mandatory information is able to book a spot, either as a registered member (logged-in) or ad-hoc.
– Ad-Hoc means they have to enter all necessary fields each time they make a booking.
– Mandatory fields should be configurable (ie: Name, Email, Cell Phone, Zip Code, Free-form comments) May change later.
– Registered (logged-in ) members should be recognized so that they don’t have to re-enter personal information. Ideally, members could also see a personalized calendar showing all their personal bookings and locations.
– Users are allowed to cancel their own bookings if they can no longer attend, in order to make room for someone else.
– Users can book multiple locations and time or put a repeated attendance for a given location/time.
– Users can bring guests with them and need to provide details about them and include in the number of spots they need.
4) There are some necessary Administration controls to ensure that only validated teachers and locations are offered:
– The Administrators need to validate teacher’s credentials before given them a profile with access rights.
– The Administrators need to validate and create the Locations to ensure they meet the needs and set capacity.
– Teachers should be able to view and access information about all attendees for the classes they teach.
– Teachers have to be able to see contact details for attendees to inform them if there is a sudden cancellation.
5) Notifications via Email or SMS for:
– teachers to advise of a class cancellation for all listed attendees.
– administrators to advise of class cancellation, change of venue, or change of teacher.
– users that wait-listed and are now able to book after some availability was released.
6) Reminders via Email or SMS for :
– reminding attendees with X hrs or X days before regarding classes they booked and need to attend or cancel.
Please let me know which of the above specific features are available from your product, including any necessary add-on’s; along with total cost to expect for it. I would certainly appreciate any comments, suggestions…
… or even alternatives if you are willing to share. 🙂
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Garth
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March 31, 2014 at 5:09 pm
Hi Luc,
I think you’d be interested in EE3 at this point because the EE4 calendar is not yet ready. Plus EE3 works so that you can have a different venue for each datetime but in EE4 the events are all assigned to one location/venue (at this point).
#1
– The calendar does have a category filter so you can categorize events according to location if you use that as your category.
– We don’t have a teacher name filter, so maybe the categories would help there too?
– The calendar is suited for people locating classes based on date and time. I’m not sure what you want for people who want to find only evening classes, but there is not a filter for that either.
#2
– You can use the venue manager to create (and re-use) different descriptions of the locations.
– Each event (datetime) in EE3 can have a different location (as mentioned above).
– Capacity is a configurable option to those who have attempted to register (but not paid) or only those who have successfully paid. EE3 will collect the registration information for those who have not paid but not count them against the registration amount. That way you can contact them for follow-up if necessary.
– Google maps integration is available in EE3 (and EE4).
#3
– The registration form system will allow you to set which questions are required or not.
– With the WP Users Integration (https://eventespresso.com/product/espresso-members/) you can allow people to create an account on your website and re-use their personal information for subsequent registrations as long as they are logged-in at the time.
– Currently people can not cancel their own bookings because if affects so many pieces of the system (accounting, capacity limits, etc.) so those have to be managed manually by admins.
– Multiple Event Registration addon (https://eventespresso.com/product/espresso-multiple/) will allow them to book multiple locations at once.
– The Group/Additional Attendees functionality people can register for one or more spaces (based on your event settings).
#4
– You will have to verify credentials and identity manually. I would just setup a regular form for teachers to gather the necessary information.
– With the Roles & Permissions Pro (https://eventespresso.com/product/espresso-permissions-pro/) add-on you can allow teachers to manage only certain events.
#5
– Cancellations/changes are done manually and you can notify attendees via the Newsletter system in EE3 or you can export the list of attendees and use your favorite email program to notify them.
– Wait list attendees are actually added to another/future event, so you will have to communicate to them individually.
#6
– Reminders are not an automatic process. That will be something we make available in only EE4. Until then we recommend using an email service like MailChimp to automate notifications like that. Or you can engage a developer to build those automatic notifications.
Does that help?
I’d recommend the EE3 Business License: https://eventespresso.com/pricing
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