How easy is it to hook into the plugin?

[Stephen Kenny]

Hi, firstly I would just like to say great plugin, I have used the free version and I was looking at the pro version and a few addons for a site. Unfortunately there are a few things that don’t seem to come with the plugins that we would need to make ourselves and I was wondering how easy it is to hook into the plugins?

We are designing an athletics site, with a list of all the races and events around the area. There are just a few stumbling blocks at the moment.

We need to be able to charge organisers for putting up events, I notice on the community events you can redirect people after they submit an event, if we sent them to a payment page, could we hook into the auto publish on return?

We need to have paid featured events, I was thinking we could use a featured category but we would have to hide it until its paid.

We need a members area where athletes can put in their name, date of birth, club and such and when they sign up for an event, the organiser gets all this information. I know the membership side is nothing to do with your plugins, but how easy would it be to hook into the registration side so that this info is linked?

Organisers will also need to be able to charge for tickets, but with different tickets for the one event and discount periods and to be able to sell tshirts and other stuff so they know what to have on hand at the event. Also is PayPal the only gateway you work with, can you do bank transfers?

Thats a few of the stumbling blocks at the moment. Its still in the design phase and we are working out how to go forward. I just don’t want to spend a few hundred of dollars and weeks on your plugins to find out that it just isn’t going to work out.

Thanks in advance,
Stephen

[George]

Hey Stephen,

Thanks for reaching out!

I don’t intend to be obtuse or make things harder here, but just to be candid and honest it’s difficult to answer the question about how difficult it would be to implement all of the customizations you list. That depends on many things unique to your project, budget, development skill, and other factors.

We are, unfortunately, not able to dive very deep into customization-related questions at all, reasons for which you can read more about here, and should read more about just so you can set your expectations here at the outset of our conversation ? https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/what-support-is-provided-for-license-holders/

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In General

In general, our plugins do provide many hooks and filters. Want to look for some or know where they all are? We unfortunately don’t have a reference of them online, which is something we’re working on, but even if we did the best and most contextualized way to find hooks and filters is to use the “Find in Folder” features of your code editor of choice on the plugin file folders of our plugins. Use this to search for do_action(, which will reveal all instances of plugin action hooks. And search for apply_filters(, which will reveal all instances plugin filter hooks.

With all that being said, now let’s get down to the details.

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We need to be able to charge organisers for putting up events, I notice on the community events you can redirect people after they submit an event, if we sent them to a payment page, could we hook into the auto publish on return?

There is indeed a hook that might help with this. The hook is tribe_community_event_created, which fires right after an event is submitted and supplies you the event ID in your callback functions, so you could make the event a “Draft” upon submission and then require payment to make it “Published” from there or something.

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We need to have paid featured events, I was thinking we could use a featured category but we would have to hide it until its paid.

This might be possible with CSS alone—each event has CSS classes that reflect what category it is in, so you could use WordPress’ post_class filter to also add CSS classes that reflect whether the event is paid or not. Read more about that filter here ? https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/post_class

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We need a members area where athletes can put in their name, date of birth, club and such and when they sign up for an event, the organiser gets all this information. I know the membership side is nothing to do with your plugins, but how easy would it be to hook into the registration side so that this info is linked?

This should be possible with WordPress-core features, which all you to extract all sorts of user data from a user based on their account ID. You can learn more about this in a function like this one, though this Codex article also links to other similar functions, so explore all of these to get an idea of how powerful WordPress’ built-in membership features are—which our plugins totally work with and support, of course ? https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/get_userdata

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Organisers will also need to be able to charge for tickets, but with different tickets for the one event and discount periods and to be able to sell tshirts and other stuff so they know what to have on hand at the event. Also is PayPal the only gateway you work with, can you do bank transfers?

This sort of thing would be possible with our Community Tickets add-on, which is a rather expensive one given the amount of functionality it provides and the fact that it requires several other add-ons to work ? https://theeventscalendar.com/product/community-tickets/

As for payment gateways, our plugins themselves do not provide that feature at all. Payments are handled by WooCommerce itself, so any payment gateway that you can find for WooCommerce should be totally useful as our plugins simply give all the functionality to get tickets, events, etc. to the WooCommerce Cart. From there, WooCommerce handles the transaction. So explore all of the WooCommerce payment options here ? https://www.woothemes.com/product-category/woocommerce-extensions/payment-gateways/

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Apologies for the length of this post—I hope it’s helpful, though!

Cheers,
George

[Stephen Kenny]

Hi George,

Thanks for the detailed response. I understand its impossible for you to say how easy it is for us to implement all the customization, its hard for me to say too!

I think your answer of the fact that your plugin has a lot of hooks and filters means that what we want to do will work with your plugins.

Now its just a case of us over here sitting down and fully planning out what we want to do with the site. Hopefully we will be back to you guys in a few weeks grabbing a bundle of plugins.

Thanks for your help
Stephen

[George]

Sounds good, Stephen—I’m glad to have helped. Do keep in mind our awesome refund policy, in which you can get a refund immediately any time within the first thirty days of purchase. I only mention this because many folks use this policy as a sort of “trial period” to test things out firsthand and see if our software is the right fit.

Learn more about this policy here ? https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/refund-policy/

I’ll otherwise close this thread for now. If you have any other questions, open a new thread any time.

Best of luck with your project,
George

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