The Ventura Tigres needed to set up a registration system for their youth track meets, to help automate their process and allow the organizers to not have to wake up at 5am to sort out the registrations! With a little help and guidance from the team at Event Espresso, this is how they have done it.
What plugins are used?
- Event Espresso – the core plugin.
- Multiple Event Registration – enables a shopping cart system, allowing the users to buy several event tickets in one go.
- Volume Discounts – allows discounts on bulk sign ups. Used here to give a discount for more than one child from the same family.
- Custom Files – various code snippets that can be built on to provide different or extra functionality.
Where to start?
We will start by creating the season events. What will happen is we will create 5 events for the 5 groups so that we can limit the number of kids that can join one group so that there are not any problems with over booking. Though not covered here you could easily set up an Overflow Event should you wish to capture possible subs if a child pulls out at the last minute.
Questions
Go to Questions and add as many as you need to that are relevant to your needs. In this example I created some sample questions:
- Previous experience
- Illnesses/conditions
- I agree to terms
You can obviously make more such as Personal Record, parent name, contact details, etc. etc.
Once the questions are done, go to Question Groups and create a group, allocating the questions you just made to that new group.
This can include options for selecting the different meets by creating new questions and question groups which can be attached to the specific events e.g create a question group for the Gremlins that includes checkboxes for 1600m, 400m 100m, 800m and only attach that to the Gremlins event.
Categories
Go to the Categories menu and Add New Category. You can add as little or as much information here as you like so long as it has a name. I will call mine Season1, and that’s the only information I will add here.
Payments
Of course we can’t have the events if there is no financial reimbursement to cover the overheads incurred. Go to the Payment Settings and find the name of the payment gateway(s) you wish to use and click it. A green box will appear asking if you wish to activate the gateway, click it. Fill out the appropriate details for the payment gateway and click the update button.
Events
Go to Event overview and create an event for the seasons first age group. I called mine Season 1 – Gremlins (age 7-8), but you can no doubt word it better than I can.
Set the registration period and the event date (event date will be the full season period). Add in a price and set the attendance limit (I used 60) and make sure you set the group registrations to Yes and the group amount to 4 (or applicable number). This will limit the number of overall places in the event and also limit how many kids can be signed up in one go. This is important as their will be a discount for 2 or more children so limiting it can help avoid parents grouping their kids too much.
Set the category to Season1 (or whatever you called your category).
Then create the event, by clicking the Submit New Event button in the top right hand side of the screen.
Go back into that event by clicking on its name in the Event Overview page and duplicate it by clicking the Duplicate button in the top right hand side of the screen.
Do this until you have five events. Edit four of those events, changing the title and the pricing and the attendee count as needed, in order to end up with the correct grouping structure, names etc.
Season registration page.
Create a new Page in WordPress, this will be for people to click on and register their kids to the season. Call it whatever you want (I called it Season) and in their feel free to write any info but make sure you add the shortcode [ESPRESSO_TABLE category_id=”season1″]. This will list just those events categorised Season1.
Now here is something a little complicated. I am using here the [ESPRESSO_TABLE] shortcode from the custom files add on.
As it stands its not perfect for what we need, so I have modified the code to simplify the table (removing some columns that are not needed) and to change the register link into an add to cart function for use with MER.
I have included a copy of the modified file (espresso_table.php) which needs to replace the one in your add on.
Volume Discounts
There will be discounts provided for the events if more than one child is registered. As such we will use Volume Discounts to handle these discounts.
In the Volume Discounts settings page set these options:
- Discount based on: Number of registrants
- Discount threshold: 2 (so if 1 kid joins, no discount)
- Discount amount: the number of discount (percent or flat fee)
- Discount type: the type of discount percent or flat fee
- Discount applied message: self explanatory
- Discounts apply to: (The category the discounts apply to) season1
Save those changes.