integration of events calendar pro with gravity forms

[Wolfgang]

My question is related to the integration or events calendar pro with gravity forms, the tool I use to register participants to courses on my website.

Currently I am testing the free version an it works fine: I use a registration form and use ‘dynamic population’ in the form’s shortcode (see https://www.gravityhelp.com/documentation/article/using-dynamic-population/) to get the details of the event a user registers to.

I consider upgrading to the pro version to allow for recurring events. This would mean that event posts would no longer be unique foreach event. I would need another way to get the specific event a user registered to.

I could no longer use
Currently, I have one event post for each event. I use dynymic population (via shortcode) to save the information about the event a user registers (date & time, or unique event code).
With recurring events, one event post will ‘contain’ several events on different dates. I therefor need another way to know which specific event a user wanted to register to.

As gravity forms is quite popular, you might have heard this question before. Do you have a best practice / known solution for this issue? I assume that there will be some field within the event post that, if it could be transfered to the gravity form, would identify the event a user subscribed to.

Thanks for your support & best regards
Wolfgang

[George]

Hey Wolfgang,

I’m sorry to bear this news, but we unfortunately do not have specific advice on this integration, nor do we have anything within Events Calendar Pro itself that will better accommodate the features you describe 🙁

One thing that is worth clarifying, however, is something you mentioned which I’ve quoted here:

With recurring events, one event post will ‘contain’ several events on different dates. I therefor need another way to know which specific event a user wanted to register to.

To be clear, this is not true. Every recurring event is still its own, individual post. For a quick example, let’s say you have an event recurring every Monday for 6 months – well, the first “event” post is created, and then the 5 other events in the series are created too but are simply made as “child posts” of the first event, which is the “parent post”.

If you’re not familiar with parent/child-post relationships within WordPress, you can read more about this online on pages like http://codex.wordpress.org.

But the main point is that, despite issues with Gravity Forms, individual events in a recurring series are still unique event posts, with their own IDs and such. I just wanted to clarify that point!

Let me know if any of this information helps 🙂

Cheers,
George

[Wolfgang]

Hi Greg

Thanks for your answer and especially for the clarification. As long as I have individual posts, I can use the same gravity form to identify an indivicual event. I will need to dig into the parent-child structure, though…

Another issue came to my mind after reading about the recurring events feature: Does the recurring event feature require a PATTERN for events? I typically have the same seminar taking place several times a year, but without following a specific pattern. Will the PRO feature allow for recurring events without patterns, too?

Best
Wolfgang

[George]

Thanks for your flexibility Wolfgang – I will address your next question which is as follows:

Does the recurring event feature require a PATTERN for events? I typically have the same seminar taking place several times a year, but without following a specific pattern. Will the PRO feature allow for recurring events without patterns, too?

Some semblance of a pattern is indeed required, though the recurrence options are quite flexible and so it does not have to be something as simple as “event happens every Friday”.

This article covers recurring event structures in more detail, so to learn more about recurrence patterns I would recommend this article and playing around with things on your own site: https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/pro-recurring-events/

If there is no pattern to the occurrence of an event, then it may simply not be a good fit for recurring events. If it’s the same seminar but in different locations and always at different times, with no pattern or regularity to occurrence, then it may be best to just create individual, “normal” events for each seminar, but then put them all in the same Event Category for the seminar. Event Categories are part of the free, core plugin and so for this Events Calendar Pro would not be needed at all → http://wordpress.org/plugins/the-events-calendar

I hope this information helps!

Cheers,
George

[Wolfgang]

George, thanks for your reply. My events do not follow any pattern, so the pro feature won’t help me… Thanks for clarifying this.
Best
Wolfgang

[George]

Sounds good Wolfgang – sorry to disappoint. Best of luck with your site!

— George

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