The Event Calendar Pro & Woocommerce Tickets, Thoughts from the Field

[Mike]

First, let me start off with saying that I truly do love this plugin. Tying into Woocommerce has given us a lot of power and options in expanding the feature set of our services (Dynamic Price Points, Bulk Pricing, Mailchimp Integration, Specialized Coupons, etc).

I have used this plugin extensively over the past 2 years, and I would guestimate that I have probably sold more tickets with it then most, if not all, of your users. To put numbers to that claim, I have processed well over 50,000 tickets using Woocommerce tickets, spread across over 3,000 individual events and about 24,000 orders. That’s a lot of use, and spread out amongst several event “types”, including classes, parties, camping trips, conventions, “club” nights, seminars, and other assorted types. I state these figures to “vet” my experience with this plugin, as I wish to share with both the developers and the community the insights my experience has given me, and my hopes for its future development. I’m going to separate these items by category, with my thoughts on the current level of robustness for the plugin.

~ EVENT DISPLAY ~

One of the most important aspects of TEC Pro is how beautiful it is. With basic HTML and CSS experience, you can truly create a gorgeous user experience, and that value can not be trivialized when one is selling tickets online. As the plugin has grown, so too has the strength of its presentation. I have absolutely no complaints or suggestions in this area, I think you guys have gotten it perfect.

~ EVENT CREATION ~

Creating events in TEC Pro is simple, but it does have some drawbacks.

1. ADD ADDITIONAL WOOCOMMERCE FIELDS TO TICKET CREATION
To take full advantage of Woocommerce, it is imperative to have easy access to certain key fields. In my case, these are “Sale Price” and “Product Categories”, but I am sure other users would have additional needs. As it stands now, to edit these fields you must open up the Woocommerce product after a ticket is created, and then edit them directly on that page. Ideally, it would be awesome if Woocommerce Tickets allowed us to choose a number of fields that would be added to Tickets box in the Create Event page, so that we could add them immediately on the creation of the ticket. I envision this as a settings page where you select the various fields you want included, and then they would appear in each Ticket creation box for new events.

2. TICKET DEFAULTS
Another weakness is the ability to add ticket “defaults”, just as we can set venue and organizer defaults. When you create a lot of tickets, being able to set the basics for the ticket information that are the same 99% of the time would save a lot of time in simple data entry and help avoid simple entry errors.

3. IMPORT TICKETS
The new “Import CSV” function for Events, Organizers, and Venues is great. We just need it for tickets too. Ideally, we should be able to import the tickets at the same time as we import the events themselves, as tickets are always directly associated with an event.

4. AUTOMATICALLY PULL EVENT PRICE(S) FROM TICKET ENTRIES
The Event Calendar has a field entry for ticket prices, which is fine if the client is not using an additional ticketing plugin. But if they are, then it should automatically pull the ticketing costs from the attached tickets to fill out this field. Why do this separately? Because we still would like to post the cost in widgets and other fields, and we can not access the ticket fields to do this. In the event that there are multiple ticket items, it should post a range for the prices. (for example, 3 ticket types for $15, $20, and $30 should like a “Cost” of $15-30 for the event details pane and event listing widgets.

~ MANAGING EVENTS ~

I run hundreds of events every month, at dozens of venues, with various staff managing the experience at each location. This means that I have 20+ people in my backend, with various levels of permissions and access. As such, we see a LOT of use in the backend sections, and it has exposed some issues.

1. ADDITIONAL FIELDS IN MAIN EVENTS LIST
There are two fields missing in the main events display. The number of tickets sold, and how many are still available. When looking at a list of events, it is critical to be able to view current sales and sales options for all displayed events, yet we have to click on each event individually to see this. I have paid developers to add in this functionality, but frequently have to update their fixes as the plugin is updated. Ideally, this should be a core feature, as it is a vital aspect of managing an event’s success.

Ideally, we should have the ability to add whatever fields we would like from The Events Calendar and Woocommerce Tickets to this list.

2. FILTERS & COLUMNS NEEDS TO INCLUDE “Today” SORTING
I have created dozens of filters to give my staff task specific views of our event data. However, the filter & columns feature lacks the ability to set the event list to display all events on “today”, or all events “from today on”. While it is occasionally important to lookup past events, most business’ and event managers focus is targeted on upcoming events, especially those happening immediately. The current workaround is to set a filter to show all events “greater than” and select the current date in the date picker. But this means the filter needs to be updated every day, and is a silly extra step.

Furthermore, by default view for events showcases them in reverse chronological order, with those events with the latest date showing first, and more pressing upcoming events showing last. You CAN set the “start date” filter to sort accordingly, but it will not save this setting, so you must repeatedly resort the fields to view the events that are right around the corner. I would suggest either having a default setting for this feature (show next upcoming events first, or some such).

3. ATTENDEE NAMES ON ORDERS
I know that this is already in development for the next release, so I won’t elaborate beyond re-emphasizing how critical this core feature is. Over the past two years I have had almost 21,000 “additional” tickets sold (2 or more tickets in an order, where Woocommerce Tickets only collects the purchaser name). With Woocommerce Ticket’s existing functionality, the ability to check in these guests was severely hampered. For larger groups (6+ tickets in one order), ticket management became a SERIOUS problem that caused undue stress and confusion right at the front door, before the event even starts. I can’t tell you how happy I am that Tribe is finally bringing this feature set to life in the core product, so I can abandon the hacks and work around that have kept us limping by.

4. TRUE SEARCHING IN ATTENDEE LIST
As it is now, there is a search option in the attendee list, but it doesn’t have any useful fields you can search for. Currently, you can search for ticket #, security code, and order #. Unfortunately, these fields are pretty much useless for about 80% of the people who walk up to “check in”, as they don’t have any of that information. I know that Tribe’s response is that the customers should have their printed ticket to check in, but that just doesn’t hold up in the real world, as only about 20% of our patrons actually bring in their tickets. We list that they need to on the website, on the events, on the emails, and on the tickets… but they just do not pay any attention to that. Realistically, we need to be able to search for purchaser name, alphabetically sort by purchaser name, and when attendee names are added, search and sort by them as well.

5. PULL UP ATTENDEE LIST FROM WEBSITE VIEW
When logged in as a user who has permission to pull up an attendee list, it would be nice to have that as an option under the “Edit Event” admin toolbar menu. This is just a convenience feature, but it would make it easier to administer the events from the front end.

~ MARKETING EVENTS ~

1. EXPANDED RSS FEEDS FOR FACEBOOK/MAILCHIMP/ETC.
Currently, TEC Pro has “out of the box” functionality in publishing RSS feeds for events on a per category basis. This can be utilized to create an automated publishing strategy for events to Facebook, MailChimp, etc. However, several key fields are missing from the RSS event feeds, where inclusion of these would allow vastly increased functionality.

There are existing tutorials for adding in the event start and end fields, and there are WP plugins that will allow you to cull an image link from the event, but we still lack a way to pull the “location” for the event. I would suggest that adding all of these fields to the default themes would greatly increase the possibilities for marketing events.

For example, with http://www.zapier.com we could configure our websites to automatically add FB events to our pages whenever a particular RSS feed has new content. We can also setup a MailChimp newsletter to automatically create a new email with upcoming events. Automated tasks that increase our marketing reach and expand our event’s potential are always a plus.

I hope my thoughts on the current state of The Event Calendar Pro and Woocommerce Tickets are helpful as you plan out the future development of your products. I have evaluated several other WordPress based event plugins, and I still believe that TEC Pro + WT is the best solution on the market. I just hope my experiences can assist Modern Tribe in prioritizing their future code additions to include features that embrace the public’s needs in the working world.

Thank you for your time!

[Rob]

Hey Mike! THANK YOU for this feedback, and I apologize that it’s taken me so long to acknowledge it. I just sent you an email replying to this. I’ll close the thread here but look forward to hearing from your email reply 🙂

[Author]

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