Attendees Order List by Last Name

[Jeff]

I’ve seen this brought up a couple of times here, but no one has really addressed it adequately. We use Woocommerce Tickets with The Events Calendar for several of our clients and they all have similar complaint: they can’t put people in alphabetical order by their names.

It has been suggested in this support forum that people should use the export to CSV function, but the problem is that the name field has both first and last names in it, so there is no way to simply sort by last name even when exporting. Additionally, it renders the checkin function in the Events Calendar attendee list virtually useless for events with a few hundred people. As you might imagine, the only way to really handle something like that is to find a person by his/her last name and without the ability to sort, either in the system admin area or through an export, it creates some serious problems for users.

Any chance there is a mod for this or some kind of workaround? At the very least, I would think separating the username field into First and Last and putting them in separate columns from the email address (Primary Information) would be a start. Thanks.

[Shelby]

Hi Jeff,

Thanks for posting! This is a great question. 🙂

I have seen this brought up several times as well, so I’m going to confer with our support team on this one, and I’m going to work on potential solutions for this and get back with you.

Let me know if you have any questions or make any progress in the meantime. 🙂

Best,

Shelby 🙂

[Shelby]

Hey there Jeff,

I KNEW this one felt familiar!

Turns out I handled a very similar thread a few months back (here), and Nico and I worked on this snippet to solve this issue. 🙂

Check out my advice and that snippet, give it a try (after backing up your functions.php file of course!), and let me know how it goes. 🙂

Best,

Shelby 🙂

[Jeff]

I appreciate the snippet. That helps to a degree, but only if the person is ok sorting by FIRST name. In the case of two of our customers, they have very large events and could have 30 or 40 people with the same first name (John or Jennifer, for example). Since the attendee export only provides limited information (name, phone, email), they typically merge it with a larger list that includes additional info, but it is difficult to do when the name field is not divided into first/last. And at bigger events, they divide people up into groups by last name to make the check in process (which is not done on the computer) faster – i.e. A-G, H-M, etc. How many conferences have you been to where the lines are sorted by first name? Obviously, it complicates the situation.

Has there been any thought given to breaking up the name field? It’s done that way with virtually every other software that works with The Event Calendar (Woocommerce, Paid Memberships Pro) and it definitely makes it tough to manage sorting and organization at big events.

[Shelby]

Hi again Jeff,

Unfortunately, it’s not very likely that we will split the name fields in the near future. There has been some conversation around this in the past (you can see some examples here and here). You can however, suggest this as a feature in our feature suggestion system here, and if there’s the demand for this, then we’ll add it to our development schedule. 🙂

Let me know if there’s anything else I can do to help out on this one!

Best,

Shelby 🙂

[Support Droid]

Hey there! This thread has been pretty quiet for the last three weeks, so we’re going to go ahead and close it to avoid confusion with other topics. If you’re still looking for help with this, please do open a new thread, reference this one and we’d be more than happy to continue the conversation over there.

Thanks so much!
The Events Calendar Support Team

[Author]

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