Posted: December 15, 2014 at 2:01 pm
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Is it still true that you can’t buy tokens for help with transitioning from EE3 to EE4? How would I go about finding an experienced contractor to help me in my area (Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN)? While not exclusively, I mostly need help in taking my existing emails and re-creating them to work in EE4. I tried months ago, but then gave up in total frustration, as there were no instructions listed in your documentation, and couldn’t get help here in the forum. (I got help in other areas, but no help in the area of setting up an automated set of emails like I have in EE3.) And it’s in no way intuitive (like simply copying one letter in EE3 and pasting it into the appropriate spot in EE4). I’d really like to stop procrastinating and get this transition done, so I’m hoping that you can point me in the right direction for finding someone local who is competent and highly experienced with Event Espresso transitions. |
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Hi, automated emails (e.g. automatic reminder messages) are not currently supported in Event Espresso 4. If that was done via custom coding, then I would get in touch with the developer that created it. If it is being handled by a service like MailChimp, then they should still work since the MailChimp Integration for Event Espresso 4 transfers registrant/attendee information in a similar way. We have Event Espresso professionals here: https://eventespresso.com/developers/event-espresso-pros/ As you are looking for a professional locally, I would check with your local WordPress Meetup group for a recommendation: http://www.meetup.com/Minneapolis-St-Paul-WordPress-User-Group/ — |
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To be clear, are you saying that, when a person registers, there is no ability through EE4 (like Event Espresso -> Email Manager in EE3) for an automated email to go out with further information about the class? To make sure we’re talking about the same thing, here is the letter that automatically goes out now in EE3: ***Please read this automated response carefully. If you have already made your payment, thank you, you can skip this paragraph. If not, please remember that your payment must be made within one hour or your registration will be cancelled. Click on the “View Your Payment Details” link below and submit your payment now.*** Thank you, [fname], for choosing CPR-Twin Cities to provide you with your American Red Cross training. Your [event] class will be held at Highland Yoga Center, located at: [venue_address] The yoga studio is in a tiny strip mall on the corner of Cleveland Ave. and Villard Ave., in the Highland Park neighborhood of St. Paul. If approaching from Ford Pkwy., be sure to stay to the right on Cleveland Ave. (when St. Paul Ave. branches off to the left). You may park in the lot in front (but please do not park in the spots directly in front of the other businesses, as them need space for their own customers). If the lot if full, there is plenty of street parking. To see a Google map of the class location, click on this link: [google_map_link] Class begins promptly at [start_time] on [start_date] and will end at approximately [end_time]. Please plan on arriving about 10 minutes early, so we can start — and, therefore, end — on time. Click here to review your payment information: [payment_url] If you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to ask. You can send an email to info@CPR-TwinCities.com or call us at (651) 699-3333. We look forward to seeing you in class very soon. |
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Hi John, That is a registration confirmation email and that is supported in both versions of Event Espresso. Automated reminder emails are emails that would go out x days before an event. These are not currently available. Do you need a unique registration confirmation email per event? — |
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Lorenzo, Thank you for clarifying the difference between “registration confirmation” and “reminder” emails. To answer your question, I may need more than one version of this letter in the long run, I pretty much just send out the same letter to everyone who registers. As not everyone chooses to pay immediately, I like to have it sent out as soon as they register, even before they make their payment. (However, for those who choose to pay electronically, a separate email confirming that they’ve made their payment is a good idea.) I’ve yet to receive any registrations since I made the upgrade from EE3 to EE4, except for some test registrations I made myself. Those came in as “Registration Pending Payment.” That much is fine. And yet I’d like a separate confirmation that includes the information from my previous auto-response. But, although I have spent a lot of time looking through the Espresso -> Messages area of your plugin, and experimented several times to recreate that email template, I’ve found that I don’t have the faintest idea how to create an auto-response email from scratch. Are there step-by-step instructions written somewhere? And, if not, can you create some? Thanks. ~ John |
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Hi, A registrant that completes a registration and pays will receive the registration approved message type. This message type does not include any payment information since they have already paid. You could split part of the information between two of the message types: + Registration pending payment Registration pending payment Go to WP-admin –> Event Espresso –> Messages. Then locate the Registration Pending Payment message type: http://cl.ly/image/2E400j1a1e1J Click on the blue primary registrant link and that will take you to the message editor for this message context. The message editor is divided into the following areas: Main Content, [EVENT_LIST], [ATTENDEE_LIST], [TICKET_LIST], [DATETIME_LIST], and [QUESTION_LIST]. Available shortcodes for each section is shown along the right side of the screen. If you do not see a shortcode for an area, then it is not available. In the main content area, you can add the following between the Event List shortcode and the blue link that says you can make a payment here: http://cl.ly/image/2n3f3D3r1834 ***Please read this automated response carefully. If you have already made your payment, thank you, you can skip this paragraph. If not, please remember that your payment must be made within one hour or your registration will be cancelled. Click on the “Make a payment here” link below and submit your payment now.*** Registration approved Go to WP-admin –> Event Espresso –> Messages. Then locate the Registration Approved message type: http://cl.ly/image/0Q471F1E1Q2j Click on the blue registrant link and that will take you to the message editor for this message context. The message editor is divided into the following areas: Main Content, [EVENT_LIST], [ATTENDEE_LIST], [TICKET_LIST], [DATETIME_LIST], and [QUESTION_LIST]. Available shortcodes for each section is shown along the right side of the screen. If you do not see a shortcode for an area, then it is not available. The shortcodes that are in use on your existing registration messaging won’t work so you’ll need to use this instead which has the new and/or updated shortcodes. Here is the remaining part of your registration messaging with the new shortcodes: Thank you, [RECIPIENT_FNAME], for choosing CPR-Twin Cities to provide you with your American Red Cross training. Your [EVENT] class will be held at Highland Yoga Center, located at: [VENUE_TITLE] The yoga studio is in a tiny strip mall on the corner of Cleveland Ave. and Villard Ave., in the Highland Park neighborhood of St. Paul. If approaching from Ford Pkwy., be sure to stay to the right on Cleveland Ave. (when St. Paul Ave. branches off to the left). You may park in the lot in front (but please do not park in the spots directly in front of the other businesses, as them need space for their own customers). If the lot if full, there is plenty of street parking. To see a Google map of the class location, click on this link: [GOOGLE_MAP_IMAGE] Class begins promptly at [DATETIME_START] and will end at approximately [DATETIME_END]. Please plan on arriving about 10 minutes early, so we can start — and, therefore, end — on time. If you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to ask. You can send an email to info@CPR-TwinCities.com or call us at (651) 699-3333. The remaining messaging above will then need to be split up as certain areas will not accept the certain shortcodes. Follow these remaining steps: https://gist.github.com/lorenzocaum/b4b5be170c5be3fd2230 — |
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Thank you for that excellent response, Lorenzo. Besides your words, your screen shots were also helpful in seeing what you were describing. While I’m not positive, I don’t think that these instructions exist in your documentation. Without you pointing out that the edits come from clicking on the blue “primary registrant” link, rather than on the “edit” link, I’m almost positive that it would never have occurred to me to go there. And if you had not specified where to place your cursor to add new language, I’m sure I’d never be able to figure that on my own. In short, let me just say that “Messages” is probably the least intuitive part of EE4. So, if these specific directions don’t already exist somewhere, I’d like to suggest that you add them. John |
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I’ve been playing around with a variety of Registration Approved, Payment Received and Registration Pending Payment emails. And I’ve also been sending myself a lot of Test Send emails, which is really helpful. Then I go to my website and register for an upcoming class. I do everything up to actually making the payment. And then I wait for an email to arrive, saying that my registration is pending payment. Yet it’s become apparent that there must be another step involved to get registrants the pre- and post-payment emails that I’m creating. But, once again, I’m at a loss for how to make that happen. So, please hold my hand and walk me through the steps. By the say, I get a lot of stalls when I click on Save or Test Send, saying that the server is not responding. It’s slowing down my process considerably. Is that my Bluehost server, or something to do with whatever gist.github.com is? It’s really irritating, as it happens far more than it doesn’t happen. |
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Sorry, that should say, “By the way,” in that final paragraph. |
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I don’t know if it’s related, but the EE4.4.8.p update also stalls out. I’ve tried several times, and I can’t get it to update. |
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Hi, Our updates are served from the Amazon S3 service so there shouldn’t be any delays. Try manually updating to Event Espresso 4.4.8: https://eventespresso.com/wiki/updating-event-espresso/#update_manually For the emails, you may want to setup Mandrill or Postmark app: https://eventespresso.com/wiki/postmark-app-mandrill-transactional-email-handling-services/ — |
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I know that there “shouldn’t be any delays” in updating to EE4.4.8 … but there are. In clicking “Update Plugins,” it opens a new page that simply says “Update Plugins,” but goes no further than that. And I know there “shouldn’t be any delays” in sending test emails and saving edited emails … but there are. I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said that at least three out of four attempts stall out, and I have to try over and over again. And each attempt takes at least a minute or two. I’d paste a screen shot, if I could, but basically the stall-out message eventually says that Safari can’t open the page “because the server where this page is located isn’t responding.” So my question was, is that my web host server or some other server? Please answer that question, and please report this problem to higher level techs at Event Espresso, to help diagnose and fix this problem. And now back to the automated email system in EE4. It’s not clear to me, are you really saying that Event Espresso no longer sends out automated emails to customers after they’ve signed up for an event? That doesn’t make sense to me that I’d need to set up a separate service, considering the fact that EE has all of those post-registration email templates in the system. So, as I really doubt that EE no longer sends out automated emails, I think you’re missing the point. How do I get those emails, whether the standard ones that come with the plugin or the customized ones that the plugin allows (the ones we’ve been discussing at great length in this forum), to be sent out? Clearly there’s something that I’m missing that I need to do to make this work, to have Registration Approved, Payment Received and Registration Pending Payment emails sent automatically. Like so many things in the tech world, those people who work in it are the worst ones to try to communicate it, as you’re too close to it to recognize that what’s obvious to you is not at all obvious to those on the outside. This is not a criticism of Event Espresso, per se, it’s a criticism of all tech companies who don’t employ not-techie communications professionals to create step-by-step technical documentation. |
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Hi John, I’ll try to break down a registration and what happens on each step. Some may seem irrelevant (and may well be) but as a whole it should help you understand what happens. We’ll work from a default install of 4.4.8, meaning the default registration status for the event will be ‘Registration Pending Payment’ and walk through what happens for a paid ticket. 1. User finds your event and selects the tickets they want on the ticket selector. 2. They click register now and are taken to ‘Step 1’ of the Registration Checkout page (also known as SPCO – Single Page checkout) 3. The user inputs the relevant details on your registration form and clicks ‘Proceed to payment options’ 4. Here they are at Step 2 of SPCO, this contains a summary of the selected tickets and all of your payment options, for example – http://take.ms/UjJGV At this point no registration has actually been created. It is all stored within a session, but not created within EE. So if you now go to Event Espresso -> Registrations. You will not see the registration there. No emails will be sent as again there is no registration yet. 5. So now the user must select a payment option. In this example we will use Invoice. Click Invoice and then and ‘Finalize’ the registration but clicking the Finalize registration button – http://take.ms/tk26A 6. Now the registration is created within Event Espresso and the user is directed to the Thank-you page. If you look at the URL in the address bar it will be something like: http://yoursite.com/thank-you/?e_reg_url_link=1-bacdf069e5224560eb578d64a35d7e47 The Thank-you page is the page that contains all of the hooks for the emails, it is only when landing on this page (through a registration) that the emails will be sent. Which emails, to whom and containing what, all depend on the Registration Status. By default the Registration Pending Payment message would be sent at this point. If we go to Event Espresso -> Messages and look within the list we will find a a message type for ‘Registration Pending Payment’ – http://take.ms/9qgp4 Notice the ‘Recipients’ section for that payment type has Event Admin and Primary Registrant? What this means is that message type will send two messages, one two the Event Admin and one to the Primary Registrant, they are NOT copies of the email, they are their own individual message. You can provide information to the Event Admin that you do not provide the Primary Registrant and vice versa. We call these ‘Contexts’ and you can read a little more on working with them (and which context your are editing at any time) here: https://eventespresso.com/wiki/messages-system-working-with-message-contexts/ So the reason you are not receiving emails from your site, is because you are not hitting the Thank you page. When the user pays using an online gateway (either on initial registration or returning later) the registration status is updated to ‘Approved’ which triggers the ‘Registration Approved’ message type OR if you manually approve the registration, you can also send the related messages when doing so, which also triggers that same message.
Both saving and sending are done by your server, what kind of hosting are you using? Shared?
There is a bit of confusion as to what Mandrill is. EE does send out emails when you register onto the event (as above) using a core WordPress function – wp_mail() wp_mail() simply formats the email a little and sets it up, then passess the email to your server which does any number of steps. The problem is that your hosting provider is likely not a mail provider (they provide mail with your hosting as a convenience) and there is a huge difference. As far as I can tell this is NOT the reason you are having problems with emails, but I (and the rest of the support team) all recommend using Mandrill (its free upto 12k emails per month). What Mandrill does is takes over wp_mail() and sends your emails to the Mandrill servers (bypassing your servers mail server)… this is useful because Mandrill are an email provider, they support HTML emails correctly and actively work to ensure their servers are not blacklisted. You can also pull in-depth reporting from Mandrill which becomes useful later on for other campaigns. One of the big differences in EE3 emails and EE4 is that within EE3, the confirmation email was basically the Registration Pending Payment and Registration Approved message all combined. In EE4 you have the flexibility to send users that have registered and paid one email with all the information needed (Registration Approved message type) and users that have not paid an email with a summary and how they can pay (Registration Pending Payment message type) the information you include is, for the most part, up you you, some shortcodes are restricted to certain message types, but generally you can include almost all of the information in all message types. Does that help? Please do let me know if I can provide any further information. |
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Once again, Tony to the rescue. Thanks so much for the thorough response. It’s going to take me a bit to get through it, but let me say two things before I forget. First, I was just able to upgrade to 4.4.8, but it was only through switching from Safari to Firefox that I could accomplish that (I’ve been trying over and over again for a couple of days now and nothing, including rebooting my Mac, would make it work until switching browsers). Second, I have tried signing myself up for classes, and have finalized the registration (going right up to the step where I’ve been taken to the PayPal page), and yet I have yet to receive a Pending Payment email. I’ll get back to you in a little while, after I have a chance to more thoroughly digest what you’ve written, but I just wanted to respond to these two things right away. |
Is this a web host or localhost? How are you updating? Auto update or manually? Your browser should have no effect what so ever on auto updates although wp.com recommend using FireFox or Chrome. Manual updates are different but should all work if using a modern browser.
The PayPal payment page is before the thank-you page. If you are using PayPal it is expected that you would be returned from PayPal themselves, either with an IPN stating you have paid, pending or failed, which again would all be processed by the thank-you page and relevant email sent. Can you try going to Event Espresso -> Payment Methods. Activate the Invoice payment method. Then place a registration and at the payment step select Invoice and Finalize. Do you receive the emails? |
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My web host is Bluehost, if that answers your question. As far as updating goes, I had tried two different methods. The first was to click on the icon on the top of the window, the one indicating that there was an update available. The other was to go to WP -> Plugins. The manual way that Lorenzo had suggested warned that I might lose everything I’ve spent so much time customizing in 4.4.7 that I wasn’t willing to take the risk. I just thought you’d like to know that it won’t work in Safari. I have the latest version, as I do of Firefox and Chrome, and I’m on the latest version of OS X (Yosemite). I tried so many times, I know this to be true. I can send you a screenshot from Safari, if you’d like. Okay, I deactivated, then reactivated both PayPal and Cheques, then registered again, selecting PayPal when asked to choose. I then finalized the registration. Although I have not filled out the PayPal info, should I not have received a Registration Pending Payment email (to remind me to pay, if I haven’t already paid)? When I cancelled that registration, I went back and chose to pay by check. That did generate an automated email, one to me as the registrant and one to me as the administrator. So that’s good news. Still, I want an automated email sent out to those who want to pay online with PayPal, reminding them that they have just one hour to make that payment or their registration will be cancelled. By the way, I also just deleted EE3 from my system. I had it just deactivated, rather than deleted, as I didn’t know if I might want to revert back to it. But, as I thought it might be causing conflicts, I deleted anything related to EE3 altogether. |
I’ve not heard of any issues when using Safari, over half of the support team are on OSX and use Safari to test with. (I’m a Windows user but will ask another member of support to double check With auto updates, your server is what does all the work, basically your browser simply says ‘Update’ and your server does all of the work involved, once your browser starts the update, it is no longer used as part of the update process. Which is why I mentioned that any browser should work. The updating issues and problems when saving/sending test emails leads me to suspect an issue with the server, possibly under heavy load causing PHP to timeout. (The switch to Firefox may have coincided with a drop in server load, allowing the update) I would recommend opening a ticket with BlueHost and asking them to investigate this issue.
Not with 4.4.x, all emails are held until the thank-you page. The reason for this is the fact that no registration is made, at all, until the thank-you page. So if we send emails before then, the links included within that email would not actually link to any registration info and would not work. This has changed some within 4.5+ but I will double check with the developers if any of the message triggers have altered in those version to allow for the situation you mention. |
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Thank you again for the information, Tony. If the developers aren’t already doing so, I sure would like to recommend that they offer an auto-response after choosing PayPal, and yet before actually paying with PayPal. I’m sure that there are plenty of people who are in such a big hurry that they miss the alerts along way in the registration process — warning them that they must pay within 24 hours (if they choose to pay online) — and then they simply forget or procrastinate. And then, in their mind, they will make an assumption that they’ve completed their registration … when they haven’t. An auto-reminder is an effective way of keeping them moving toward the goal line. |
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I will add this as a feature request for discussion. I have a correction to make from my previous comment:
The registration is in-fact created when the registrant selects an online payment method (off-site or onsite) however we still do not send emails at this point because it is assumed unless the user has cancelled, that the registration is still in process. We only decide what registration status message to send after the transaction is finalized (when they hit the thank-you page).
Whilst I agree with some of the logic here, when selecting PayPal you can either Pay or Cancel so I’m not sure I understand how providing an email stating they have 24 hours to pay, whilst they are at the Payment screen of PayPal helps remind the user to pay? Unless you are setting the Default Registration Status to Approved, the registration will not apply to the attendee limits. If the user selects PayPal then closes the browser, that is effectively an abandoned registration, it does not apply to the event. |
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Tony, here’s a typical scenario that might help you to understand the logic behind my desire for an automated email to go out prior to paying. The person has been searching the Internet for a CPR class and, for whatever reason, they’ve landed on my site. They find the particular class they’d like to attend and start the registration process. Then, when they click “finalize,” it finally sinks in that, yes, they’re going to have to pay for it. Yes, there have been warnings about this fact along the way but, for whatever reason, they’ve missed it. And now it sinks in that, “Oh, I don’t have my credit card here with me,” or, “Oh, I can’t make PayPal payments from my work computer,” or, “Oh, but my employer is going to be making the payment, not me.” You get the idea, I’m sure. For a long list of possible reasons, they’re not going to be able to complete the transaction at this very moment. So, In EE3, I’d manually send out a reminder email:
And the result was that some, though not all, of these people would go back and complete the registration. Without such a reminder, it’s likely that they’d not only have to start the registration process again, but they’d end up doing their entire Google search again (as they’ve already closed out of that page). And, who knows, the person who was about to become my customer inadvertently has become someone else’s customer. And that’s why I feel so strongly about at least having the potential to automate a pre-payment email to me, the administrator, so I can follow up with these folks. Or, if your system could do that followup, without me lifting a finger, that would be even better. But, at the very least, I hope you’ll go back to notifying the administrator about the potential customer. |
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Thank you John, I do see the value in this and have opened a feature request ticket so it can be discussed with the developers and see what we can do. Currently within 4.4.X this feature is not available, future version of EE4 handle registrations slightly differently (within the plugin itself) and so it may be possible to add this to a future version. I have added a note to update this thread with the outcome of the ticket. |
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Thanks, Tony. I appreciate that I’ll be kept in the loop. |
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