Pre-Sales Question

[Gaylea]

Hi There,

I am from a non-profit/charity organisation based in Australia that offers free meditation classes.
We are in the process of changing from Joomla to WordPress.

Background: We run our events from
1. Retreat Centres (where people stay for the whole weekend)
2. Meditation centres which are dedicated meditation places (and users stay for 1 hour)
3. Class locations which are volunteer homes (where users stay for 1 hour)

We are looking for a booking app to do the following:

We have 26 (volunteer) meditation locations and can run up to over 1000 events per month so we need the ability to firstly:

1. a) Segregate our events so that they arrive on a parent page that has the 7 states of Australia (hopefully in a grid format – so it all displays on one page).

b) The user then selects the state of Australia that’s relevant to them) and from here it goes to all the locations in that state (some states have up to 11 locations) – we prefer to keep the locations in grid format again – so it all displays on one page.

c) The user then selects the location they want and from here they get a running list of the events at THAT location based on DATE FORMAT.

For instance:
Have a landing page where people first get the 7 states.

THEN they click on the state they are looking in and then then get the main locations in that state ie
– in NSW we have 8 locations
– in VIC we have 7 location
– in QLD we have 11 locations , etc, etc, etc.

So ideally on this page they should get 11 different locations for QLD, 8 location for NSW, 7 locations for VIC etc, etc, etc.

THEN when they click on one of those locations and THEY GET ONLY THE LIST OF EVENTS that are local to THAT location.

2. We need the ability to have our different locations running events (ie same meditation course) simultaneously from totally different locations (at the same time – even if we have to do this via creating 26 custom booking forms for the same course – but allocated to different locations).

For instance: our Introduction to Meditation Course could run on a Monday night from Sydney, Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Queensland, all at the same time 7pm Monday night (but from totally different locations in Australia)

3. Ability to customise our booking forms (legally our retreat centres need to collect totally different information for their retreat bookings compared to our class locations or our formal meditation centres).

Sometimes even a meditation event/class itself may have different legal requirements (such as children’s meditation classes) so we need to be able to factor this in via customised booking forms for different events.

4. Ability to create Single events (to use at our Meditation Centres or Class Locations) PLUS Retreat Events – which span over a weekend timeslot.

5. Ability to create recurring events that are date driven (ie our free introductory meditation course has a duration of 1 hour per week for 4 weeks every Monday night).

However we need to be able to close off booking for the latter 3 events and only accept the actual meditation booking for the first event session (because our meditation classes are sequential and each subsequent event builds on the previous events course content).

6. Ability to Send customized reminder emails (ie our retreat centres have different legal requirements to our normal meditation centres or class locations and we need to advise our attendees with different messages)

7. Ability to ability to add people to a waiting list on all events (custom). Especially our retreats have month long waiting lists for popular events.
8. All our events are technically free as we are non-profit charity so we don’t need tickets and we do need to be able to run things for free (not paid).

9. Ability to limit the amount of people attending an event.

10. We would like to have multiple event registration – however this does not work for our meditation retreat centres (due to the legals). Is it possible for us to have it on some things but not on other things?

11. Are we able to create different user capabilities in our backend? All locations need the ability to login and create their own events.

Our best case scenario in relation to user capabilities would be to have them restricted to their own locations so that when they login in the backend – they only see the stuff (events) that is applicable to their own locations.

12. Does your app have the ability to create private events not visible to the general public (even if this is done simply by a link)? Sometimes we hire out our retreat centres to other groups and so the general public ARE NOT INVITED to those events. So we need the ability to separate out our private events.

13. We are looking for the ability to be able to install a hook that will allow us to integrate our events with Interspire email marketing software (we have a developer who is able to help us with this).

Look forward to hearing back
Gaylea

[Cliff]

Hi, Gaylea. Thanks for your interest in our plugin suite.

Firstly, our product is very flexible (extensible via coding) so it can accomodate a lot of different feature requests, but we do not provide a “bookings” solution. The closest thing we have–in concept–is tickets for recurring events… however, this functionality does not currently exist but is on our long-term roadmap.

Our ticketing product also doesn’t currently support PRO’s recurring events.
If you start to create a ticket for a recurring event, there will be a little question mark notice that reads:

Currently, tickets will only show up on the frontend once per full event. For PRO users this means the same ticket will appear across all events in the series. Please configure your events accordingly.

You should add your vote to this existing feature request for Event Tickets to support PRO’s recurring events.

Something some users are doing right now is using PRO’s recurring events to populate their events calendar but then breaking each occurrence from the series to turn them into single events — basically using PRO as an event generator but not actually using its recurring events functionality on the front-end. Others are just dealing with the tickets on recurring events even though you can’t then tell which occurrence they reserved the ticket for… use this information for your own reference but please don’t take it as any sort of recommendation.

Please let me know if you have any follow-up questions on this topic.

Last but not least, we have Bundles and a pretty great Refund Policy so you can buy one or many of our add-ons and thoroughly test them.

I hope this info helps. Let me know if you have any follow-up questions.

 

[Gaylea]

Thanks for letting me know Cliff.

Appreciate your honesty.
Gaylea

[Cliff]

Of course! Anything more I can help with?

[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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