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Corey Harrison
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December 21, 2012 at 4:36 pm
Hi,
I’m building a site for football academy that runs programs for children.
EE works well for posting the events however falls over badly when it comes to the registration process.
I’m happy to change the Primary attendee to parent name, however additional attendees need to allow the parent to put in their child’s detail. Name, DOB, Gender and Medical Conditions/Additional Info.
I cannot have parents prompted to put in an email address for each additional child as I’m not sure too many 5 year olds have email address’ (this is a massive limitation of the plugin).
Is there any way to do this? Or are there any plans to add dependent functionality to the registration process?
After paying for this plugin I’m hoping I don’t have to abandon it and start over with another solution.
As a suggestion for future features allow users to store attendants in their profile for quick registration.
Thanks
Corey
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erin sap
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December 23, 2012 at 11:37 pm
I wrestled with this same issue just this week when using the plugin to have parents register their kids for a local youth track club.
The fields I used/require for the kids are exactly those that you listed. I went live with the online registration early Saturday AM and its working out well.
I first tried to make the personal info be the athlete info, but then billing was in the kids name, and often pre-populated with the parents their wordpress account info, so I switched it back and made te personal info the parent info just as you did, and called the next question group athlete info. I then instructed the parents to enter their info each time for each child/attendee. The heading for each in my case was Athlete, so it listed Athlete 1, Athlete 2, then the subheading was parent into and athlete info. I added brief instructions on the little nuances and let them know they can use the “copy from other fields” function. In the Athlete question group I only listed what was required about them.
It would be nice if parent info would have only been required once as an option but the plugin assumes that this is going to be the attendee.
Most parents only sign up one child, so there is no confusion there, but we have some with 2-3 kids. Its been smooth sailing the past 3 days so far.
Not 100% optimal, but it works – and this is a major improvement over getting up at 5am to setup for signups as the club has done for the past 15+ years and a good place to start.
More in agreement with you, more refined control would be a very welcome addition (allow the person signing up be just a purchaser (i.e. if gifting tickets to someone else), a parent/guardian registering their kids for a class or team, etc…
Hope you get this working in your favor!
Erin
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Dean
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December 24, 2012 at 12:58 am
Hi guys,
Yeah, I agree Event Espresso could do with strengthening in that area, as it isn’t always easy when you need a third party to purchase the tickets on someone else’s behalf.
What Erin has in place (and thanks for sharing) is pretty much the best way to do that as it stands.
With 3.2 being worked on the structure of how attendees and tickets are dealt with internally so it may help make this easier, I don’t have full details on it yet.
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Corey Harrison
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December 24, 2012 at 5:44 am
I understand that this is how it can be done, however this is really not an option for me. This is not a new business or a business that has not had access to an online registration system.
I am rebuilding a site and while the site itself is poor and difficult use for the admins, the registration process is actually very good. It gives parents the ability to register their kids once and thereafter they can simply check which child they wish to register for other events.
My client is not interested in the registration process becoming more complicated and I can’t blame them.
I feel that EE could benefit in focusing on a more streamline registration system. This is really what an event plugin should do best. At the end of the day events are there to be attended not just look pretty in a browser.
I have read many a post on this issue and too many times it is met with a defensive and unhelpful “this is not supported”. This is a so called “premium” plugin and I am sorry to say that some of the support staff are of no support whatsoever. There are so many people giving away quality plugins and only too happy to help users customise them to there needs. Yet after purchasing EE as many others have, and finding it’s glaring limitations, this attitude from support is very frustrating.
Sadly, I believe this to be an insurmountable problem. And if there are no plans to even start the journey towards a better registration process, then I feel I will have to cut my losses, which are many and move on.
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Josh
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December 24, 2012 at 10:08 am
Hi Corey,
Thanks for the feedback. As support staff, we work very hard to help folks get Event Espresso up and running. In most cases, it works out great. Sometimes there are requests for features that currently do not exist in the Event Espresso plugin. We keep track of these and make sure that the dev team is aware of the new features that get requested. Since the support staff are not developers, we are limited to supporting features that currently exist. This is the case with most premium themes and plugins.
From reading through your last comment, it sounds like you may benefit from using the Members/WP user integration add-on. This allows for storing of basic registration, and with some custom development could be extended to include information for a child’s registration that will auto fill when the parent returns to the site later.
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