Customizing the html ticket that gets sent to the purchaser.

[Ariel Rosenberg]

We use the tickets all the time for small events and are getting ready for a larger event. At the larger event we would like people to be able to buy multiple tickets and share digital or paper versions with the people who they have purchased tickets for. There used to be pdf tickets sent-now it is just an email. On the page it says
“Tickets are emailed to users, so you can customize them to suit your event.” I don’t see where we can customize the ticket email for multiples and sharing/printing.

[George]

Hey Mary,

Thanks for reaching out to us here – first, I’m curious what you mean about your comment here:

There used to be pdf tickets sent-now it is just an email.

Do you mean that when you used our WooCommerce Tickets add-on in the past, it sent PDFs instead of emails? Or do you just mean that you previously used another solution on your site altogether, which itself send PDFs, and then switched over to our add-on which sends emails?

Just curious about that bit 🙂

As for your main question, specifically, the main thing you need to know about customizing the email templates is simply the location of the email template file itself. For the email, this will be /tickets/email.php in The Events Calendar (the core version of the plugin, not in the WooCommerce tickets add-on!).

With that in mind, you can use the principles outlined in detail here for customizing the /tickets/email.php template → https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/themers-guide/

This should help you get started, let us know if it does!

Thanks,
George

[Ariel Rosenberg]

This reply is private.

[George]

Hey Mary,

Thanks for clarifying what you meant about the .pdf tickets, I wasn’t certain if you might’ve been using some alternative solution in the past and switched over.

I’d first like apologize that you’re finding our new ticketing system unsatisfactory on the points you raised here – you are not the only customer who has voiced a desire for .pdf tickets, and while I don’t have a definitive release date for new features or anything, a reintroduction of .pdf ticket support is in the pipeline for our ticketing framework products for sure.

In the meantime, however, it is unfortunately the case that editing how tickets appear and what information is included them requires customizing code – and thus, if you can’t do that yourself, yes, you’d have to hire someone or find a developer to do it for you.

I’m really sorry about the limitation at this time.

However, one thing I’m curious about is what you wrote here:

[…] and to have something that the purchaser will be able to share via email or print and give to people they have purchased tickets for.

Our email tickets should still be completely shareable via email, printable, cut-outable, anything. And they should work fine with multiple ticket purchases, here’s as screenshot of three tickets I bought at once when testing some code recently → https://cloudup.com/c4IiKEiTx-4

So I’m curious, what is it about these tickets specifically that does not meet your needs? Do you find that they are sufficiently printable/shareable/etc., but just don’t look a certain way that you’d find ideal?

I only ask these questions because while our email tickets might not meet all of your ideals, they should hopefully at least be quite useable – I’d love to learn details about how we can help you here, perhaps at the very least just to have something better in place until we release the .pdf-tickets update some time in the coming year. (Although, note that one of the hard things about PDFs is that they are extremely hard to customize! Which is one of the main reasons we switched to HTML email tickets.)

Finally, if you’re interested in a list of great developers who could make something for you that meets your ideals here, feel free to shoot us an email at [email protected] for a list of folks we recommend.

Apologies for the long email here Mary. Let us know some of your specific gripes and desires in more detail and what we can do to make it right 🙂

Thank you!
George

[Ariel Rosenberg]

I think the main problem is that they don’t function like a ticket, they function like an email. Most people don’t notice the “ticket” part of the email. The other issue is, if someone has purchased 10 tickets (like our board members will do for a fundraiser), they will want to send 2 tickets to one couple, 2 tickets to another etc. All of these people will show up at the door at different times. You can’t divide up the email to give couple one ticket numbers XXX and another couple a different set of tickets. So at the door we look like idiots because 5 couples all have the same 10 sets of ticket number and cannot check them in properly.

[George]

if someone has purchased 10 tickets (like our board members will do for a fundraiser), they will want to send 2 tickets to one couple, 2 tickets to another etc.

How is this specific dilemma resolved or improved by having PDFs instead? If the solution is “Well, they’ll print out the pdfs”, how does printing out the emails not solve the problem in the same way?

If someone is buying 10 tickets for other people, the burden of communication about that seems to be on them to say “hey, these are your 2 tickets”. Is that correct? Then people can print, cut out their own tickets, etc. Which seems to be the case if there were .pdfs as well, is that right?

Thanks for your feedback here!

George

[Ariel Rosenberg]

I understand that you don’t see the value of it, but we and our customers do. People respond to visual cues that they are used to. They recognize the attachment and a pdf is easily split and shared digitally.

[George]

Hey Mary,

I’m really sorry if you feel like my probing here implies that I (or we at Tribe collectively) don’t see the value of PDF tickets. That is certainly not the case!

We started out with PDF tickets and take your feedback very seriously. To be clear: my questions above are aimed at trying to get to the root of what PDFs provide for you that the HTML emails do not.

I’m curious because bringing PDF tickets back as an option has been discussed a healthy amount in our development meetings in recent months. It may indeed come back into our products.

However, even if they do return, it will be a while before that’s publicly released.

So I’m trying to figure out how we can make the HTML email tickets work for you as best as possible in the meantime.

If the tone of my questions above was hard to decipher before, hopefully you can trust me that it’s an honest miscommunication and that we are genuinely curious about your answers to these questions → http://theeventscalendar.com/support/forums/topic/customizing-the-html-ticket-that-gets-sent-to-the-purchaser-2/#post-976274

There could be something simple we can recommend to help minimize the bad parts of HTML tickets in your use case, perhaps some HTML to more “cleanly” separate the tickets in HTML? Or styling things to make them look more like paper/cut-outable tickets?

Just some ideas. Your feedback is appreciated, though if you’d rather close out this thread for now and just use the HTML tickets as-is, we can do that too.

Let me know what you think and if you have any other follow-up questions here, concerns, etc.

Thank you,
George

[Ariel Rosenberg]

If the email was customizable it would be helpful. It’s impractical to hire a developer to do something that simple.

[George]

If the email was customizable it would be helpful.

Hey Mary,

The information I shared in the first reply on this thread should indeed still be quite useful if you want to customize the tickets → http://theeventscalendar.com/support/forums/topic/customizing-the-html-ticket-that-gets-sent-to-the-purchaser-2/#post-969024

There’s enough flexibility within the confines of customizing those HTML templates to not need to hire a developer, unless you feel truly out of your depth with the HTML and PHP editing required there.

I’m truly sorry about the lack of PDF tickets at this time. If there’s anything else I can help with here, please let me know.

Thanks,
George

[Th]

The events calendar v3.10.1

Want to customize the email template (it only states the start date/time, need the start and end)

You mentioned “For the email, this will be /tickets/email.php”

There is no directory named tickets inside the plugin /public_html/dev/wp-content/plugins/the-events-calendar

I cannot find email.php to copy it to the themes and start customizing.

[Th]

Found the proper method for customizing ticket emails and got the end date in there.
Copied /public_html/dev/wp-content/plugins/the-events-calendar/src/views/tickets/email.php to /public_html/dev/wp-content/themes/canvas/tribe-events/tickets/email.php

The trick was to find the template file you need to customize inside /wp-content/plugins/the-events-calendar/src/views/ and copy it over to /wp-content/themes/yourthemename/tribe-events DROPPING the /src/views/ part and replicating the folder structure inside that.

NEXT email template mod needed:
The URL given at the bottom of the email is to the website, instead it would be more helpful to point to the event page that the ticket was purchased from. One click would remind them of all event details from their email.

Right now the function to print the URL is: home_url() is there a function to print the actual event url?

[George]

Hey @th,

To link directly to an event, the default WordPress function get_permalink() should work fine – read more about this function here → https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/get_permalink

So, at the bottom where you see home_url() used in both the href attribute for <a> tags and in the text for the link itself, you can replace it with get_permalink( $ticket[‘event_id’] )

Try that out and see if it works as well for you as it should!

Cheers! 🙂
George

[Support Droid]

This topic has not been active for quite some time and will now be closed.

If you still need assistance please simply open a new topic (linking to this one if necessary)
and one of the team will be only too happy to help.

[Author]

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