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Posted by Seth Shoultes on Thursday, April 11th, 2013
The latest version of Event Espresso (3.1.31.P) has now been released and is available from your account page. We have also been hard at work and have updated most of the major addons with extra features and fixes.
Please check out the change log to see a full list of the 50+ updates.
Here are some of the key items to get you started:
3.1 Updates and Fixes:
Below are just some of the changes made. One of the major aspects here is that we have prepared Event Espresso for the next iteration of WordPress, version 3.6, which will include jQuery 1.9.
Added compatibility for Jquery 1.9
Corrected the British pound character encoding issue on the Invoice
Resolved the language files causing attendees to be incomplete
Modified the Overpaid status so it no longer marks as incomplete
Resolved the Post categories not “sticking” when submitting a new event
Resolved the Venue information not being copied into a duplicated event
Updated the Paychoice gateway
Updated the Megasoft Gateway
Added new Russian language file
Added attendee count (quantity) as email shortcode
Addon Updates and Fixes:
We have released a long awaited new add on into the Pre Release channel, the Front End Manager. With this addon, your logged in users can create basic new events from the front end, so no dashboard access required.
Alongside that, the Calendar addon has had a facelift and some back end changes to help with speed for those of you with large numbers of events.
Front-end Event Manager 1.0 PRE RELEASE
Created a Front-end Event Submission Tool/Addon
Added pricing section
Added Category Manager
Espresso Ticketing PRE RELEASE
Added the seat numbers/tags to ticketing addon
Updated Button Styles
Reduced the size of the QR code
Espresso Calendar 2.0.5 PRE RELEASE
Added throttling to the calendar
Created better looking tooltips
Roles & Permissions Basic 1.5.4 PRE RELEASE
Roles & Permissions Pro 2.0.6 PRE RELEASE
3.1.32 PRE-RELEASE Updates:
Even though we have just released 3.1.31.P we have already been working on getting the next version prepared and ready, as such version 3.1.32 is now available in the Pre Release section of your account page for you to check out. The main things in this section are 3 new payment gateways including Google Checkout/Wallet.
Due to scheduling conflicts and some health issues, we’ve postponed our hangout a week to March 19. Don’t worry, everyone will be fine, we just wanted to make sure our hosts would be 100% and available for another awesome show. We’ll have Darren from the development team on to talk about the new Messages system he’s been working on for 3.2. We’ll also be selecting a customer web site to feature for our Espresso Shots segment (thanks for sending in the suggestions for titles!) as well as talking about the new API and iPad app, our Postmark/Mandrill plugin and our new Event Espresso Pros page and developer resources. We’ll also answer any questions or topic ideas you may have that we think would be good for the show, so fill out the form below if there’s something you’d like us to talk about or if you’d be interested in being a guest host.
Event Espresso is an online event registration and ticketing management plugin for WordPress. We help event managers, businesses and organizations achieve their goals with more efficient and profitable online event registration and ticketing.
This beta version brings more than 45 improvements that range from front-end design changes to new gateways and security improvements. If you’d like to get your hands on the newest up-coming version Event Espresso customers can download it now from the Pre-release (beta) channel.
In 2013 we began a new process for developing, testing and releasing new versions of our online event registration and ticketing software plugin for WordPress. So far the new process has served us well. We’ve been able to stick to a regular schedule and our products undergo more thorough testing than ever before. Part of the testing and announcement process is to make the new version of Event Espresso available for customers to for testing (both our code and their applications for the next version).
3.1.31.Beta Includes
Fixes
British pound character encoding issue on the invoice template
Venue information not being copied into a duplicate event
event_espresso_do_ajax not working with Jquery 1.9
Cross-side scripting vulnerabilities and the “ee” and “event_id” parameters
SQL injection vulnerabilities in “event_id” parameter
WorldPay button option does not get checked
Miscalculating amounts and discounts in the PayTrace gateway
warning: missing argument 2 for wpdb::prepare() in /includes/functions/pricing.php line 333
Remove translation function from $payment_status value
Quickpay not receiving correct total
Realex: Add additional hook to init gateway file
South Korean currency incorrect
Rcurring Events Manager: Undefined Variables
Fixed Authorize.net Payment button
EVENT_LIST event_category_id not working
Add support for PayPal tax and shipping
Added a bypass_nonce flag to recurring events manager
Filter Month in Event Overview not showing all events and other filter issues
Creating ellipsis’ on some servers – fixed by truncating event names
Missing featured image shows broken image icon
Prevent XSS attacks
USAEpay Itemization
page dropdowns in the Page Settings section of the General Settings admin page, broken due to recent WP changes
Fatal error: Cannot redeclare mb_substr()
Undefined variable: category_met
Datepicker in Event Editor doesn’t work in WP 3.5
Quickpay gateway errors when used with Multiple Events Registration
Posted by Seth Shoultes on Wednesday, February 20th, 2013
The Event Espresso iPad app allows you to transform your iPad or iPad Mini into an onsite attendee management tool. This sweet little app allows you to quickly check-in attendees and view information at your events and attendees. Built-in ticket scanning capabilities allow you to scan tickets at your classes, meetings, conventions, concerts, and everything in between.
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What can I do with this thing?
This thing makes your life easier on the day of the event. The large screen display allows you to see more information quickly, and track the current situation with your event registration. Here are few more fun things you can do with it:
Detailed ticket scanning system
Manual attendee check-in and check-out
Detailed registration and check-in tracking
Attendee registration forms (coming soon)
Detailed attendee, event, and venue information
Where can I download it?
The Event Espresso HD iPad app is part of our growing library of mobile apps and can be downloaded from the iTunes App Store. Don’t have an iPad? You can use our iPhone/iPod or Android apps to scan tickets as well. More information on our Ticketing addon page.
Important Note:
You will need to download and install the new JSON API addon to connect your iPad to your website. If you have a current Business, Developer, or Ticketing support license, the JSON API add-on will be available in your account.
How does it work?
Using the Event Espresso JSON API addon (a required plugin), once installed on your WordPress website, the iPad app can retrieve a complete data set of events and attendee data, allowing you access to most of the attendee admin features of Event Espresso. Future versions of the app will allow you to add and edit event and attendee data, directly from the app.
Anyone using Event Espresso to manage events/classes and accepting registrations on their WordPress and Event Espresso powered website can use this app to scan tickets, monitor attendee access, view registration details, and more.
Posted by Seth Shoultes on Wednesday, February 20th, 2013
The new Event Espresso API addon allows other applications (other websites, mobile apps, etc) to access your Event Espresso data through an application programming interface (API).
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What kind of really useful stuff can I build?
Using the Event Espresso API, you can get information on all events and attendees, and even check attendees in and out of events. Supposing you have WordPress installed and active on mysite.com, once this addon is activated you can send an HTTP GET request to http://mysite.com/espresso-api/v1/events/public to retrieve all the event information from your site in JSON or XML format, which your client application can then use and display however you like. You can access and work with most of the Event Espresso admin features, allowing you to create solutions based on your needs. The API enables developers to build innovative and engaging applications that can interface with any website that uses the Event Espresso plugin for events, classes, meetings, scrapbook conventions, concert ticketing, including:
Custom event lists with role based (public/private) access to event data
Custom website app integrations
Role-based access to attendee data
Cached database queries
Offsite registration forms (coming soon)
Ability to create customized analytics
Is the API supported?
Yes, Event Espresso customers have access to our Restful API Codex and support in the support forums. The API is compatible with Event Espresso version 3.1 and 3.2 (coming soon).
How does it work?
The Event Espresso API gives developers a complete API platform for directly accessing data event and attendee data securely and efficiently from outside your web server. All a developer needs to know about is the API Endpoint URL for your site. Example: http://staging.eventespresso.com/testdrive/espresso-api/v1/events/public.pretty_json
How do I get access to the addon?
Anyone with a current Event Espresso Business or Developer Support License or Ticketing addon can download this addon for use on their site, from within their profile/account page.
Is this a replacement for the Espresso Services API?
Yes and No. The current versions of both the Event Espresso iPhone and Android mobile apps CANNOT be used with this API. However, you should have no problems running both API’s side by side. We are working on switching over the iPhone app to the new API as soon as possible. We are also actively looking for someone to help us switch the Android app to the new API. The new Event Espresso iPad app will be available soon.
Why did you create this addon?
We are hoping the addition of this addon will drive developer adoption around for Event Espresso plugin and our community of dedicated users.
We all know Event Espresso can do lots of different types of events. One of the most basic events — by which I mean, one that Event Espresso lends itself naturally to — is concerts and performances. Music venues have a maximum capacity — which can be set with the maximum number of attendees setting — and venue information can be stored in the venue manager and used to provide information and a Google Map about the venue. With the seating chart, ticketing add-on and mobile app, you can sell actual seats and check people in at the door.
One of our users who has been working with Event Espresso for a long time has built a couple sites for a couple music venues in Canada that have really paid off. His name is Mark and he runs Muskoka Graphics, a small design and development studio. His background in the music industry led to some jobs for local venues which ultimately needed to be able to sell tickets online. In the early days, this was handled by a simple, customizable script Mark wrote that would handle the PayPal purchase. But as these websites grew, so did his need for a more robust, reliable platform, and that’s when he found Event Espresso.
Early Event Espresso adoption leads to success
In the early days Mark contacted us often and we saw this as an opportunity to really stress test the plugin for our ideal client — someone running an actual venue on Event Espresso. Mark says the thing he likes most about using Event Espresso is the support. “These guys are right on any problem or issue or even general questions. You can’t really put a value high enough on the kind of support these guys offer.” Most of the early issues in those days had to do with scale — these were venues that were selling events out quickly which wasn’t something we had previously had the opportunity to test for. This led to numerous speed and stability enhancements in the plugin. After a while, we stopped hearing from Mark.
So imagine our surprise and enthusiasm when he contacted us to let us know that one of the two sites he’s built using Event Espresso made over $35,000 in less than 48 hours running the latest version of Event Espresso!
World Class Entertainment
Peter’s Players is a small, 88 seat theatre that specializes in world class artists like Johnny Winter, Taj Mahal and John Lee Hooker. The other venue Mark maintains, the Kee, seats 1000 and also brings in top tier artists and has seen Snoop Dogg, April Wine and The Tragically Hip. Says Mark, “I have watched [Event Espresso] perform on my server after a mass email have over 40 people buying online almost simultaneously. I have watched [Event Espresso] sell 1000 tickets in 3 hours. They are rock solid and I trust them with my clients businesses.” Mark uses mostly the out-of-the-box features of Event Espresso — waiting lists, coupon codes & early registration discounts, and invoices — but also takes advantage of the WP User Integration add-on to provide member discounts for registered users.
Powering 100 million ticket sales a year
This is only the latest success story of Event Espresso. Recently, Garth pulled together some numbers based on the User Survey responses we’ve been collecting over the past year. With the user-survey data we were able to estimate that Event Espresso powers over 250,000 events and sells over 100 million tickets per year! This deserves its own blog post in the future, but we thought you’d find it interesting that the example above is not the exception.
We’ve been busy on our YouTube channel lately. In addition to the monthly Espresso Bar hangouts, we just recently produced two new video tutorials and posted them to our YouTube channel. This screencast walks you through creating a recurring event — specifically for the purpose of creating shifts for people to sign up for, but can apply to other types of recurring events as well.
This tutorial walks you through some of the features of the WP User Integration add-on and the two new shortcodes it adds — the My Events shortcode, to display a list of events an attendee has registered for on the front end of your site, and the Edit Profile shortcode, to allow your users the ability to edit their profile without having to log into the WordPress admin.
Networking with other like-minded people and organizations can make a significant impact on your success as an event manager, website programmer, or designer. If you haven’t already discovered that, then you will soon! We know it’s important, so we’ve created several ways to help you engage with other members of the Event Espresso community:
Are we missing anything that would help you connect with the Event Espresso community?
Here are some of the key benefits and reasons to network with other Event Espresso users:
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1. Building New and Strengthening Existing Relationships
Building a relationship is about more than just connecting to someone else’s online profile. You might have 500+ friends on Facebook or the same number of connections on Linkedin, but do you connect with those people on a daily basis about how to grow your business? Quit “liking” or “poking” old friends; connect with the people and organizations who are working on the same projects and have the same goals as you do. That’s a real business relationship.
2. Discovering New Ideas
Do you want to know how Event Espresso users can process 80,000 registrations in a single month or $35,000 in 48 hours? You’re not going to find that by watching your news feed on Facebook. You’ll learn more important ways on how make your events more successful by engaging with the Event Espresso community than any other source. Do you want your friends to “like” you, or do you want your customers to like you (for example, by attending your events)?
3. Building Your Reputation
You might have a thousand points of expertise on your Linkedin profile and your resume might be three pages long, but those aren’t any good to the wrong audience. You’re using Event Espresso and your business is similar to hundreds of other businesses. The Event Espresso community will value your experience and skills the most. Join the discussion and build your own brand today.
4. Finding New Opportunities
Event Espresso probably has more features than your local coffee shop has flavors. But imagine how many combinations you can create with all the coffee flavors or Event Espresso features? Building Event Espresso as a plugin for WordPress also allows you to use a variety of other plugins and themes, but which ones do other people use? There is a wealth of information available among the thousands of Event Espresso users, we just need to ask the right questions and encourage each other to share the right answers. What questions do you have and what insight can you give? What would you like to learn more about?
5. Access to New Information and Learning
Organizing, managing and promoting events is an ever-changing job and there might be a thousand different ways to do something. But if you had the chance to ask someone else who has been there, would you take the opportunity? You might be surprised at what other people know and how it can expand your knowledge. We also can’t read your mind about what you want to know, so the only way for anyone to help you is to ask.
6. Gaining Advice From Other Experts, Find a Mentor
At Event Espresso we ask a lot of questions each day. We ask each person of the team questions about technical issues or how we can better serve our customers; we ask customers each day about how they use Event Espresso and how we can improve our events plugin; and we ask third-party developers and mentors how to deal with the challenges of growing a small business. But no matter who we ask for help, we always get the best answers from people who have walked down that path before. Our mission is to help you grow your business, and as you grow you’ll be faced with many different challenges. You should have a team in your corner who can look at the problem from outside the fight and give you advice on what your next steps could be.
7. Sharing Your Expert Advice, Mentoring Others
One of the most challenging and rewarding things you can do is help someone else be more successful. It takes a lot of courage to give your opinion that might not be accepted, but if you have real-life experience then no one else can refute your knowledge. Your simple opinion is also helpful for others who are uncertain about what path they should take. In nearly every case your participation and encouragement can help other people be more successful.
8. Finding New Products and Services
How did you learn about Event Espresso? You might have had to search for an online event registration plugin for WordPress, or you might have been one of the lucky ones and had a friend recommend it to you and saved you from all the searching costs. Either way, by connecting with other Event Espresso users you will have access to other event organizers who know how to solve your same problem. For example, what website hosting company should you use with Event Espresso or trust?; what merchant account do people like best and is most affordable?; what is a good WordPress theme, etc? Event Espresso will be your best resource for answers to these and many other questions.
9. Generate New Business Opportunities
When was the last time your old high school friend on Facebook was able to help you earn business from a new client? Is your Linkedin profile among the top 10% most-viewed profiles? We know that neither of those relationships or statistics are as productive in generating new business than networking with like-minded businesses and potential customers.
10. Recruit New Members of Your Team
It really is hard to find good help these days. We’re creating new ways for you to find help from other Event Espresso users, programmers, designers, marketers, etc. who can help you make your events more successful. Need to hire someone? We have a Job Board where you can post free (and paid) job listings, and we try to tweet out all the job postings to our extended network for you. We also know that the best place to find good help to manage your online event registration is by building relationships with other people who are doing the same.
11. Have Fun
Event Espresso was started after Garth and Seth worked together for three years. They’ve enjoyed working together, and their work has become their hobby. Some of their best friends are now people they work with. They enjoy networking with customers, programmers, business managers, etc. Hopefully you get to do what you enjoy – we enjoy having you part of the Event Espresso community.
Conclusion
Again, at Event Espresso we know that if you meaningfully engage with on other like-minded people and businesses to achieve your goals, you can learn who to trust and how to do things better. Participate with us in the community today via:
Seth is the original founder of Event Espresso, a project that began as a way for his wife to have people register for her scrapbooking events. He’s one of the lead developers, spending most of his waking hours working on Event Espresso 3.1 features and bugfixes.
Chris is a general handyman around Event Espresso, working the forums, email, custom development and occasional contributions to Event Espresso core and add-on development. Chris is responsible for rewriting much of the Event Espresso Requirements Check plugin and has been with the team for the past 2 years.
Brent is the lead developer for Event Espresso and has been responsible for leading much of the development going into Event Espresso 3.2 as well as wholesale bugfixes and refactoring in 3.1. He’s in British Columbia, so we’ll forgive him for looking like he’s rolled out of bed right before the hangout because it’s probably true.
During the hangout you’ll be able to send us questions or comments live via twitter with the #EventEspresso hashtag or via IRC (our hangout page will have a IRC embed below the video so you can log in and watch live, or just join #eventespresso on freenode on Tuesday).
A new version of Event Espresso is available, packed with fixes and some new features to make your event management a smoother and faster process.
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Compatibility with Jetpack
As always with our minor point releases, the focus of Event Espresso 3.1.30 was bugfixes, and the biggest of those was the Jetpack compatibility fixes. If you are a Jetpack user and you’ve had to deactivate Jetpack or downgrade to an older version, you’re in luck. This version of Event Espresso has been tested to work with the latest Jetpack.
Payment gateway updates
Another issue that might have affected some of our Dutch users who are using the iDeal gateway was the conflict with the WooCommerce iDeal gateway. That’s been resolved as well, along with a number of other important updates to the rest of the payment gateways. We also removed some of our old, hard-to-support legacy gateways. The reason these were removed was because those gateways do not provide developer accounts — so we couldn’t test them — and we don’t have a lot of users using those gateways. Instead of trying to invest the time in updating them blindly, without knowing if they actually work or not, we’ve put them up in a public GitHub repository. Anyone interested in taking over updating these gateways, can fork them or submit pull requests.
Language file changes
Speaking of GitHub, did I mention that our language files are there now? 3.1.30 introduces the new language “side-load” feature, removing the languages from the core plugin (for a smaller package size) and hosting them on GitHub, automatically downloading them to your site if you are using WordPress in another language. Additionally, .30 introduces the ability to upload your modified language files to /wp-content/uploads/espresso/languages.
Cart registration process and other fixes
We made a modification to the Multi Event Registration cart registration process for events that did not have group registrations active. Previously, those events would display a radio button, but that didn’t always send the number of attendees and a radio button, with no other options, isn’t exactly the best use of a radio button semantically. We’ve replaced this with a dropdown, which makes more sense and actually sends a value every time.
3.1.30 also adds a number of security fixes and updates.
New features
We did add some new stuff, too. The EVENT_LIST shortcode now supports multiple categories in one event list. A new System Status page gives you an overview of your server information and what plugins you have active. And we’ve added support for using hooks in WordPress themes for your Event Espresso registration pages to provide more customization options.
Updated Seating Chart
WordPress Event Ticketing Seating Chart
This release also is required for the new version of the Seating Chart alpha. A number of fixes were made to the Seating Chart to fix things like mis-aligned rows, section alignments, and registration prices.
So go update Event Espresso now, or download the latest version in your account area. If you have any questions or problems be sure to let us know in the support forums.
Please note: WordPress 3.5 is required for the latest version of Event Espresso. Please upgrade WordPress before updating to the latest version of Event Espresso.
Seth is the original founder of Event Espresso, a project that began as a way for his wife to have people register for her scrapbooking events. He’s one of the lead developers, spending most of his waking hours working on Event Espresso 3.1 features and bugfixes.
Chris is a general handyman around Event Espresso, working the forums, email, custom development and occasional contributions to Event Espresso core and add-on development. Chris is responsible for rewriting much of the Event Espresso Requirements Check plugin and has been with the team for the past 2 years.
Brent is the lead developer for Event Espresso and has been responsible for leading much of the development going into Event Espresso 3.2 as well as wholesale bugfixes and refactoring in 3.1. He’s in British Columbia, so we’ll forgive him for looking like he’s rolled out of bed right before the hangout because it’s probably true.
