Really need multiple date/time support for single events.

[Tevya]

I understand PRO has recurring events. That’s not what I want, and not what a number of your other customers have requested. What I need is for a single event to have multiple dates and times. My client would like to sell a live, in-person class that’s every Tues night from 7 – 9 for 5 weeks. It’s not a recurring event, and we need to sell a single ticket that gets them into the entire 5 week course. We’d like for it to show up on the calendar accurately: on the dates selected, at the time(s) selected. But it’s all 1 event.

This is something a number of your customers have requested previously. Here’s a sample, right here on your forums: https://theeventscalendar.com/?s=event+multiple+dates&submit=Search&post_type%5B%5D=topic. I don’t see it on your Uservoice, but those are always of dubious efficacy because I may simply be not searching for the same way someone else worded it. Sadly, on some of those tickets you’ll see at that link, the thread was left unanswered, and/or completely misunderstood by the support agent.

I’d be happy to purchase PRO, if this were a pro feature, but it’s not. It’s simply a badly (and commonly) needed feature that’s been completely overlooked. A simple solution would be an “+” button beneath the date and time to add additional dates/times. This would be sufficient. A more robust solution would allow you to set recurring dates. Not a recurring event, but recurring dates within a single event.

I hope this is something you can implement soon. It’s badly needed, and not just by me/my client.

[George]

Hey Tevya,

I’m sorry about the frustration you’ve had with this unsupported feature in our codebase. While it is indeed not a built-in feature at the moment, nor one slated for the next release, there are a few things I want to address here that will hopefully be helpful.

First is your description of your specific problem and project requirements:

My client would like to sell a live, in-person class that’s every Tues night from 7 – 9 for 5 weeks. It’s not a recurring event, and we need to sell a single ticket that gets them into the entire 5 week course.

At this time, there is not support for “recurring tickets”, so if you did set up a PRO recurring event every Tuesday from 7-9pm for 5 weeks, you would be able to sell one ticket that qualifies for that whole 5-week stretch of events. I agree that it’s a little hacky and frustrating to do this with the current way our plugins handle this, but the steps that our support team member Brian outlined in the second post on this thread would enable this functionality pretty successfully → https://theeventscalendar.com/support/forums/topic/tickets-for-recurring-event-no-recurring-pattern/

I just wanted to share that information in case it is helpful as a workable – not ideal, but workable – solution for now.

Another thing to point out is that this is not something we’ve completely overlooked or don’t care about – we have some seriously-awesome improvements to how our ticketing and recurrence systems relate to each other coming soon, and improving our Recurring Events system often gets a lot of attention in our development cycles. We listen intently to user feedback and yes, you are right about several users requesting this sort of capability in our events – it is indeed something on our radar.

—

Finally, one thing I wanted to point out is that by using custom fields, you could patch something together with a bit of custom code that gets pretty close to the functionality you are looking for here. While I understand this isn’t as satisfactory as having all the features built-in to the plugin to begin with, it may be helpful depending the scope, needs, and budget of your project. If you’re interested in a list of freelance developers we often recommend, feel free to email us at [email protected] – we will happily share that referral list.

Let us know what you think about all this Tevya. I’m sorry about your disappointments here and hopefully at least something in the information I’ve shared here is helpful in some way.

Sincerely,
George

P.S.
We are quite lenient with refunds within the first 30 days after purchase – so, since you mention not even having PRO and therefore cannot experience the current built-in functionality directly, it might be useful to get a PRO license, play around with the existing recurrence functionality and solutions like the one Brian recommended (that I shared a link to above), and see if you can have something usable here. If not, email us at [email protected] and we can issue a refund promptly :).

[Tevya]

Thanks for your detailed reply. I’ll look into these options. It’s especially good to know this isn’t being overlooked. Most of the other threads ended with essentially “you can’t do this, but you could use recurring events” or no reply at all.

I could have sworn I read somewhere that you can’t sell recurring events? That they ticket plugin doesn’t work with them. Or did I misunderstand, since it sounds like that’s what you’re saying I should do? If that does work, can we still display them as single events in the list view? I don’t want 5 different events for each class.

[Tevya]

I bought Pro and tried it out. That’s not going to work unfortunately. I need it to show an event just 1 time everywhere, except in the calendar view. I’ll just use the free version and WooCommerce Tickets for now. I can make it work that way. But will happily buy Pro again, if recurring/multiple dates are added for individual events. I’ll email that address to get my refund.

[George]

Hey Tevya,

I’m sorry for your disappointments here. There are many features we’d love to have in the codebase, and every release cycle is a balancing act of adding in things we want, things the customers want, things that good performance and security need, but in each case not being unreasonable with our abilities and material constraints to actually do the things on time…

So some of the functionality that you described as missing here is indeed on our radar, and even though you’ve requested a refund, I do encourage you to please stay tuned to our product updates and changelogs! We’ve got new features and improvements coming all the time.

For one example, in your recent post you mention:

I could have sworn I read somewhere that you can’t sell recurring events? That they ticket plugin doesn’t work with them. Or did I misunderstand, since it sounds like that’s what you’re saying I should do? If that does work, can we still display them as single events in the list view? I don’t want 5 different events for each class.

At this time, in the publicly-available versions, it is indeed not possible to sell “recurring tickets”, to describe those features that way. But this functionality is actively in development and coming in a public release very soon.

That’s just an example to show that we are constantly working on these products and improving them. Your feedback in this thread is appreciated, and if you have feature ideas, don’t hesitate sharing them on our official UserVoice page here → http://tribe.uservoice.com/forums/195723-feature-ideas. We take this page very seriously and incorporate a lot of ideas from users here. It’s a great way to have your voice heard as a customer – and supported by other customers who want the same thing! 🙂

Thanks for giving our plugins a try Trevya, hopefully sometime in the future you’ll find our products a bit more suitable for the needs of your projects.

Cheers,
George

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