Booking Cut-off Time/Date

[Ben Bracken]

Hello,

I’d like to be able to prevent people from buying most of my bookings 23 hours before the event begins, but there will also be some events where I’d the like the cut-off date 3 days before the event actually starts – to allow for some information to be sent through the post to the buyer, before attending the event.

Does your plugin allow a cut-off time and date to be entered in this way for each event?

Thanks for your help,
Ben

[Cliff]

Hi Ben.

We have The Events Calendar (TEC) and Event Ticket (ET) plugins available free. We do not have a dedicated “bookings” functionality, though some do use it in this way.

If you want to charge per ticket/booking using an eCommerce plugin (e.g. WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, etc), you would need to upgrade to our paid product, Event Tickets Plus (ET+).

Whether using only TEC & ET or TEC & ET & ET+, you can set limited quantities and you can set when the tickets are available. If they’re sold out, it’ll state that. However, if someone views the Event while tickets are not yet available, the tickets won’t even appear yet.

Last but not least, we have a pretty great Refund Policy so you can buy one or many of our add-ons and thoroughly test them.

Let me know if you have any follow-up questions.

[Ben Bracken]

Hi Cliff,

I’m currently having a website built for me by a professional developer which will use your Events Calendar plugin to sell training courses being run from 45 venues in the UK.

We’re currently testing The Events Calendar, and when ‘Birmingham’ is typed in the ‘Near’ field of the search form, two US locations appear as live suggestions (Alabama & Mississippi), but Birmingham UK doesn’t appear at all – despite the fact that we have a large training venue in Birmingham (UK). Which will mean that none of our potential customers using the search form will be able to find and book a place at this venue.

I was hoping that the search form could be set up so that only UK cities appear? But my developer has said that The Events Calendar uses a Google API for searches, so this problem can only be fixed by Google. Is this entirely accurate?

Any suggestions to correct or work around this fault will be very gratefully receieved. So, thanks in advance for your help!

[Cliff]

Ben,

I apologize for the delayed response. I have been doing quite a bit of digging. Here’s what I’ve discovered:

• In theory, if all your Venues’ locations are in the UK, our code’s call to Google is supposed to return results within certain “bounds” (lat/long) to avoid showing Birmingham USA when it makes most sense to return Birmingham UK
• However, a bug about this not working was logged internally over a year ago. I guess the solution has been eluding us or it would take some refactoring to correct and therefore hasn’t been as high a priority to fix. I really can’t say for sure so I’m just speculating.
• I did pass along to our strategy/development team members the importance of trying to get this working in a not-forever time period. Obviously, for your specific usage, you’d like it to be done already; I just don’t want to set your expectations like it would be done within a month or two, as I can’t say if or when.

I’ll mark this ticket as Pending Fix, which means this thread should receive a reply once the applicable fix has been released. I cannot guarantee when it will be fixed as it’s in the development team’s hands now. They need to assign it, code it, test it, and schedule it for release.

I apologize for this issue and appreciate your understanding and patience.

P.S. Here’s a note from our internal bug tracker that might help…

One customer was able to do a gmaps query using the autocomplete API instead of the geocode one, and get the correct results (he linked here and provided the following code snippet):

mapTypeId: google.maps.MapTypeId.ROADMAP
};

var bounds = new google.maps.LatLngBounds(
new google.maps.LatLng(49.383639452689664, -17.39866406249996),
new google.maps.LatLng(59.53530451232491, 8.968523437500039));

var input = document.getElementById('sei');
var autocomplete = new google.maps.places.Autocomplete(input);

autocomplete.setBounds(bounds);

}
google.maps.event.addDomListener(window, 'load', initialize);

He said he didn’t leave it in place because he directly editing the plugin files and knows that isn’t a sustainable way to customize a plugin’s code. But maybe it’ll help your developer in some way?

[Ben Bracken]

Thanks for that full answer, Cliff. I seriously appreciate it.

I’ve been waiting almost 11 months for my developer to finish my client’s website, and they’ve only just discovered this issue – so you can imagine how desperate I am to get a quick fix.

I’m no coder myself, but I understand that it’s best practice to use ‘custom hooks’ or ‘override callbacks’ to edit the functionality of plugins. Is this something that my website developer might potentially be able to do with that code snippet – to make The Events Calendar plugin use the autocomplete API instead of the GeoCode API?

Alternatively, I was wondering if there might be some way to automatically add “UK” to every search performed, because currently typing “birmingham uk” in the search form is the only way to make this particular venue appear within the results?

Massive thanks again,
Ben

[Cliff]

Ben, I understand and appreciate the story.

Unfortunately, I cannot advise on this any further in regards to custom coding, but I can tell you that there aren’t PHP WordPress filters; it’s all JavaScript. I’m unsure if this is able to be overridden outside of editing the actual plugin’s files.

[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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