Creating events and tickets

[Nicholas Turbanov]

I’ve been investigating recurring events and their tickets recently. It really seems that I can’t assign stock level for each ticket in an event series as it’s only one product in WooCommerce terms. Based on this I’ve decided to discard using recurring events and focus efforts on individual events + tickets only (which are proven to be working fine). Setting individual stock level for every event ticket in a series is must have and certainly same stock level can’t be “shared” among several days.

Now I’m looking for possibility to create events and corresponding tickets in (semi-)automated way. I noticed there is import possibility for individual events which in theory would fullfill half of the requirement. Additionally there are plug-ins to import products to WooCommerce which would the other half.

However the main problem is how to connect these two (events AND tickets) together? Can I use any interface to do this? Or do I have to go directly to database and alter data there?

Input data could be anything suitable such as text, CSV etc. Ultimately must have is to automate creation.

I would be very thankful for any hints how to achieve this.

[Barry]

Hi Nicholas,

Thanks for contacting us!

I’ve been investigating recurring events and their tickets recently. It really seems that I can’t assign stock level for each ticket in an event series as it’s only one product in WooCommerce terms.

This is true: in fact, at this time, we do not support the use of tickets with recurring events.

However the main problem is how to connect these two (events AND tickets) together? Can I use any interface to do this? Or do I have to go directly to database and alter data there?

Great question!

Tickets – the products themselves – are connected to events via references maintained in the post meta table. Each ticket (product) has a _tribe_wooticket_for_event key and the value is simply the post ID of the corresponding event.

Does that help at all? I’d recommend inspecting the following source file to learn more about the various post meta relationships that are maintained:

src/Tribe/Commerce/WooCommerce/Main.php

Good luck with the project!

[Nicholas Turbanov]

Thank you for your response! I think this enough for now. We’ll investigate how to proceed based on this details.

[Barry]

Excellent 🙂

[Nicholas Turbanov]

Do you have any update on when you might support this feature? At the moment it’s a show stopper for our project and I hesitate on doing custom development for a third party premium plugin. I understand that it’s a very complicated issue and if you haven’t been able to solve it, I doubt we’ll do much better in a meaningful timeframe.

So basically I’d very much like to know if this is even in your pipeline and whether we’re talking about sometime in the near or distant future.

Thanks.

[Barry]

You specifically mean do we have plans to support the use of tickets with recurring events, right?

If so, yes we do. It’s not a simple endeavour, though, so I can’t really guess at when this will land. However, a lot of the groundwork is already underway and some features – such as the ability to move tickets and ticket types between different posts – have already shipped. Though features like that one turn out to be pretty useful generally, the motivation for adding them was to better equip merchants for a future where tickets can be applied to recurring events (if a recurrence pattern is changed and some events are ‘orphaned’ as a result, for example, we need to allow any tickets that were already issued to be relocated).

Further improvements to the recurring event engine are underway and we hope to ship those soon: all of this, while not directly giving you the final solution you are seeking, is largely being done to let us get to a point where we can offer recurrence support (for tickets) in a sane and maintainable manner.

At the heart of your question though is a request for a hint about when you’ll have what you need and, unfortunately, we’re not positioned to answer that. There are various large scale pieces of work that need to ship first (and will probably need to be tuned following user feedback) which makes it hard to predict things with any accuracy. That does at least allow me to tell you we’re talking about more than a short few months, however.

I hope that at least gives you a sense of what is underway and some encouragement that we’re working seriously on this, even if I can’t provide you with a timeline as such.

[Nicholas Turbanov]

Thanks for the elaborate response Barry, this is what I wanted to know. As mentioned, I fully understand the complexity of the feature (actually we need multilingual support as well 😀 ) and appreciate your efforts.

This is enough for me to explain the situation to my client and figure out how to proceed.

Thanks!

[Barry]

Excellent, happy to be of assistance 🙂

[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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