Organizer aka Merchant Dashboard

[Ryan]

First and foremost, my partner Matt & I are beyond appreciative of the creation/work/vision/updates that you have offered to us. I am not the coder or technical person: My partner Matt is that person so my post is coming from an outside non-technical perspective but the concern is deep. I am the visionary & run the sales and marketing for us when time permits. We have built/customized a beautiful community event website with our core being the tribe.

My vision from the beginning was simple: Create a local event website that can challenge the eventbrite’s of the world. What we have/had going for us is we’re “local” and can not only offer similar features but could market your event to the 25,000 subscriber base I have accumulate over the past 3 years with my prior group buying website. I noticed events were the #1 attraction consistently so the move was calculated.

To be perfectly honest, my choice was to use another WP calendar plugin for our new event website launch. Matt took some time to review the support, reviews and clean code and said hands down, you are the one. To this day, I agree with him and I have no regret. But, somewhere, somehow through that creative process I lost the principals of my original vision.

Here is why I’m posting tonight for help/guidance: A organizer reached out tonight and said to me ” Ryan, love your site but we’re torn. Yes, we love working with you because your local. Yes, we like the idea of you blasting an email out to 20,000 + subscribers…but in the past we’ve used Eventbrite and we have to say…not being able to:
1. See whose purchased tickets to our event (attendees)/ be able to download real time a list
2. Refund tickets
3. Edit not only the words, but the pricing
4. Email notifications of when someone purchases a ticket

I understand the driving force behind Tribe but my vision was to build an event website where I don’t have to host my own events anymore…I can set a playground for others to host theirs and be the marketing/promotions/ticketing engine.

If I’m way off or missing something, please help me understand. If Tribe’s intention is/will never be to have the basic features of say an Eventbrite (#1 through #4) I need to know now as our future success rides on it.

I am happy to discuss with Tribe the price of what it would take to give/empower me with these features so my company isn’t held back- because at this very moment I feel all of us are missing out on possibly the biggest opportunity in this industry which if not addressed, could lead to the biggest missed opportunity and ultimately failure.

All the best,
Ryan

[Ryan]

Matt here – just to piggy back on to Ryan’s post. I think the “Attendees List” that shows the avatars on the event page is a starting point to work from, and I’ve been looking in to that code to modify to pull in additional information such as the purchaser’s email, name, order ID, etc…so hopefully I could build out the list of information to show on the organizer’s dashboard. I’m struggling a bit to pull in that information though and have hit a roadblock.

I just want to clarify that we aren’t missing something – currently there is no way for an event organizer to view the attendees list (like it shows on the admin dashboard) outside of either having editor access (which would give them access to all events) or us, as admins, manually sending them the information. Is that correct?

[Brook]

Howdy Ryan & Matt,

I really appreciate this post. It is nice to hear the background of what’s going on, and where we’ve been able to help and where we could help more. There is huge to me in hearing how people grow and operate their event businesses, it helps us shape our goals.

The first thing I wondered after reading your post is “are you a Community Tickets user?” After looking at your licenses I do not believe you are. Have you ever investigate that plugin?

1. See whose purchased tickets to our event (attendees)/ be able to download real time a list
2. Refund tickets
3. Edit not only the words, but the pricing
4. Email notifications of when someone purchases a ticket

1. Community Tickets contains a list of attendees, and gives a front end for people to check folks in even via QRs if preferred.
2. It does not allow refunds yet. We are actually working on adding RSVP cancellations right now, and our mockups include a section for getting refunds as well for past orders. This might not be quite what you’re looking for as its intended for end users to request a refund for their own orders, not an organizer to process them.

   Matt, it would be possible to build an organizer refund area already using the existing WooCommerce APIs combined with the Community Events ones. It would certainly require a few days of dev time to do right. I am pretty versed in these APIs and my guesstimate for me to build it would probably 8-12 hours of time. If it went really smooth it could happen quicker, but if it didn’t…

3. This is also a feature of Community Tickets.
4. This is a pretty embarrassing omission on our part. One of the things on our roadmap is a pretty full fledged overhaul of our emails to make it easier to do newsblasts, notifications, etc. Technically I think you could do this already to using WP actions. Upon completion of a Woo order you could send out a separate email to the organizer email address. It could get a bit tricky trying to find the right filter/or hook that will still give you access to the product ID, which you will need to obtaine the organizer ID and email. But I am sure one exists.

A couple of things I mentioned are Woo specific, but if you’re still using EDD like you were last yeasr I believe this will all still be possible. I am just not as versed in their APIs to say with confidence off the top of my head.

With that in mind does Community Tickets sound like it will satisfy some of your needs? Does the direction we’ve been heading with that plugin sound like something you’re keen on?

It’s nice to meet you guys!

– Brook

 

[Ryan]

Hey Brook,

Thank you for the detailed response. It sounds to me like Community Tickets would pretty much cover what we need. I can do without the automated emails as long as the end client has access to a real time dashboard, outside of going in to the WP Admin area, which it sounds like this does.

I did see this add-on before, but the fact that it says it requires WooCommerce to be installed and activated has stopped me from looking in to integration of this add-on, as we have EDD pretty heavily integrated in to the site. With that said – I don’t really want to fork out $149 to install it and realize getting it integrated with EDD is above and beyond what I have the skillset to do, so I believe we are still a bit stuck right now.

What would be the best course of action in your opinion?

Thanks, as always, for the great support!

Matt

[Brook]

You are very welcome!

Thank you for the detailed response. It sounds to me like Community Tickets would pretty much cover what we need. I can do without the automated emails as long as the end client has access to a real time dashboard, outside of going in to the WP Admin area, which it sounds like this does.

I agree with you. It’s goals line up pretty nicely with the features you’re looking for. Except..

I did see this add-on before, but the fact that it says it requires WooCommerce to be installed and activated has stopped me from looking in to integration of this add-on, as we have EDD pretty heavily integrated in to the site. With that said – I don’t really want to fork out $149 to install it and realize getting it integrated with EDD is above and beyond what I have the skillset to do, so I believe we are still a bit stuck right now.

It does require Woo! I did not notice you were using EDD until the last half of my post so I did not think about this. Running this without Woo will not be possible. The split payouts, where your organizer gets a cut and you do too, are pretty heavily reliant on the WooCommerce APIs.

What would be the best course of action in your opinion?

It sounds like y’all are facing a pretty big cross roads here.From what I understand you basically have 3 options:

1. Build the 4 features Ryan outlined yourself. This seems quite possible with the current APIs, but time consuming and you won’t have the advantages that come with using premade and constantly updated software. For instance it seems possible you guys might even be interested in the split payments feature at some point, but that’s not yet on your current list.
2. Install Woo and Community Tickets. You can actually run this alongside side EDD. Naturally people checking out with Community Tickets events will be checking out with Woo though, so if your treasured customizations are on the checkout or post sales aspects they will not be available for those tickets.
3. Try switching platforms. I honestly do now know of any real competitors to Community Tickets, especially built atop WordPress. But it is possible one exists. This is probably worth researching. Keep in mind there are always going to be unforeseen problems in any major platform switch. But if you find one that looks extremely promising it can be worth it.

That’s a big decision. I love EDD, it has a certain simplicity or focus to it that makes it great when you’re only selling digital products. But Woo outstrips in popularity by about 20 to 1. There is good reason why, Woo has numerous features EDD lacks, it has an extremely powerful framework, and still works really well when you are only selling digital goods.

I just checked with our lead developer and he said there has not yet been any discussion of us bringing the Community Tickets functionality to EDD. In truth there are so few EDD users compared to Woo that it is very hard for us to justify these investments. At times we are actually losing money on building/supporting the smaller platforms like EDD. Bringing a feature as big as Community Tickets to EDD could very likely cost us money upfront and continually cost us more money than it makes each month. I would not be surprised if this plugin never support EDD.

To me option 2, which involves either running Woo alongside EDD or switching entirely, is likely the best longterm option. It sounds like the goals for our plugin Community Tickets lines up nicely with your own, so you will be benefiting from each feature release as time goes on. And right off the bat it will address some of the major things you’re facing now. You have been customers for a long time. I’d be happy to share a zipped up copy of the plugin with y’all so you can test it out if you want.

I hope that helps! Please let me know as you have any more questions.

• Brook

[Ryan]

Hey Brook,

Again, thank you very much for the discussion. This is all very helpful information. I think running Woo alongside EDD, on an already plugin-heavy site (yea, we have more than I’d like), isn’t really something I’d like to do, but if you’d be willing to send me a zip that I could throw in to our development environment to see how it reacts with the site that would be very helpful.

I don’t anticipate going this route, but if I can look into it without the upfront cost of purchasing that would be great. Who knows, for what we need, maybe this is doable, at which time we would purchase our license. We have customized our checkout pretty heavily (style-wise) with EDD so having to do that again with Woo to match doesn’t sound fun and would split our purchases between two different systems (again, not great!).

I completely understand TEC’s stance on EDD. You have to build-out and develop what the majority of users are using, which is Woo. No problem. It is good to know that there are no plans to integrate EDD with Community Tickets, at least we won’t just keep waiting and hope it happens.

Let me ask you this – we currently have the ability to show a list of ‘attendees’ on the event pages (it shows gravatars currently). Do you have any idea how difficult it would be to re-purpose that code to display more than just gravatars? I think if I could re-purpose that to display information like the attendees name, email, purchase ID, etc… and simply add a link to the vendor’s dashboard that display this information that would pretty much accomplish what is most important.

We don’t have the need to auto-split payments or anything like that, so just a list of purchases with supporting information would suffice. I did look at the code briefly and I am able to pull in the purchase ID but in my brief efforts wasn’t able to pull in any of the purchaser’s additional information.

Again, I really appreciate your time and discussion on this one. The site is growing so we want to keep vendors happy. Just had an event sell out 225 tickets!

Cheers,

Matt

[Brook]

This reply is private.

[Ryan]

Hey Brook,

Thanks again for all your help. I’m going to toy around with things over the next week and see what I can come up with. I think I’ll be able to accomplish what we need without the use of the Community Tickets, so if I have any other questions I’ll certainly let you know and update you once I figure things out.

Thanks again!!!

Matt

[Ryan]

Hey Brook,

Over the weekend I was able to come up with a nice solution and I think we’re all set. I’ve re-purposed the attendees list code to also show a more comprehensive list with details, but only to admins and event organizers. Here is what it looks like:

https://pondhole.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/attendees-list.png

I also added a CSV export and a print option. I think this should do the trick! The only other thing I updated was the event list screen for organizers where they can edit their events, I added an ‘attendees’ link that takes them to the event page and scrolls down to the list of attendees.

I think we’re all set. Next step is getting an email sent to organizers each time a sale is made.

Here is the code should anyone else need it (note: I’ve removed jQuery needed for the print and CSV functionality):

<?php
/**
 * Renders the attendee list for an event
 *
 * @version 4.1
 *
 */
?>
<div id="tribe-attendees-table-wrapper" class='tribe-attendees-list-container'>
	<h2 class="tribe-attendees-list-title"><?php esc_html_e( 'Who\'s Attending', 'event-tickets-plus' ) ?></h2>
	<p><?php echo esc_html( sprintf( _n( 'One person is attending %2$s', '%d people are attending %s', $attendees_total, 'event-tickets-plus' ), $attendees_total, get_the_title( $event->ID ) ) ); ?></p>

	<ul class='tribe-attendees-list'>
	<?php foreach ( $attendees_list as $attendee_id => $avatar_html ) { ?>
		<li class='tribe-attendees-list-item'><?php echo $avatar_html; ?></li>
	<?php } ?>
	</ul>

  <?php if( is_admin() || current_user_can( 'edit_post', get_the_id() ) ) : ?>
  <h2 class="tribe-attendees-list-title">Admin Purchase List
		<span class="report-button print-button"><i class="fa fa-print"></i>&nbsp;&nbsp;Print</span>
    <span class="report-button csv-button">CSV Export</span>
	</h2>
		<table id="admin-attendees-report-table" class="display" cellspacing="0" width="100%">
		<thead>
				<tr>
					  <th style="text-align: center;">#</th>
						<th style="text-align: center;">Order #</th>
						<th style="text-align: left;">Name</th>
						<th style="text-align: left;">Email</th>
						<th style="text-align: center;">Ticket #</th>
				</tr>
		</thead>
		<tbody>
		<?php $purchase_number = 0; ?>
		<?php foreach ( $attendees_list as $attendee_id => $avatar_html ) { ?>
		<?php $purchase_number++ ?>
				<tr>
						<?php
						$order_id = '';
						$attendee_name = '';
						$attendee_email = '';
						$ticket_id = '';
						foreach ( $attendees as $key => $attendee_obj  ) {

								if ( isset( $attendees[ $key ]['attendee_id'] ) && $attendee_id == $attendees[ $key ]['attendee_id'] ) {
										$order_id = $attendees[ $key ]['order_id'];
										$attendee_name = $attendees[ $key ]['purchaser_name'];
										$attendee_email = $attendees[ $key ]['purchaser_email'];
										$ticket_id = $attendees[ $key ]['attendee_id'];
								}
						}
						?>

						<td style="text-align: center;"><?php echo $purchase_number; ?>

						<?php if ( ! empty( $order_id ) ) : ?>
								<td style="text-align: center;"><?php echo $order_id; ?></td>
						<?php endif ?>

						<?php if ( ! empty( $attendee_name ) ) : ?>
								<td><?php echo $attendee_name; ?></td>
						<?php endif ?>

						<?php if ( ! empty( $attendee_email ) ) : ?>
								<td><?php echo $attendee_email; ?></td>
						<?php endif ?>

						<?php if ( ! empty( $ticket_id ) ) : ?>
								<td style="text-align: center;"><?php echo $ticket_id; ?></td>
						<?php endif ?>

				</tr>
		<?php } ?>
		<tbody>
		</table>

</div>

[Brook]

That is beautiful! Well done. Thanks for sharing the code Matt.

• Brook

[Ryan]

Thanks for all your help Brook.

[Brook]

You are most welcome. Thanks for adding the EDD Community Tickets idea to our feature suggestion page. We’re interested to see how many folks are in your shoes.

Until next time!

• Brook

[Author]

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