Do you currently run or plan to run events that need to accept bookings, such as seminars, training courses, non-profit fund raisers, marketing events, or even a big event like a school concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Co-ordinating event registrations can be a complicated and time-consuming process. You have to co-ordinate scheduling, event dates, participant numbers, data collection and storage, payment processing and sending invoices, confirmations and reservations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and delivering tickets to participants.
There are lots of advantages to setting up an online event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce costs, help you easily copy settings for previous events, give event managers more control, create a better user experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting up a web-based event booking system can be quite expensive.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-powered site, you can easily install a very inexpensive and highly professional online event booking system.
Introducing …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily create your event and begin processing bookings in just minutes.
(Set up multiple events and process online registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed application that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can use a range of event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up ticket-selling, to creating custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your event attendees, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing notifications.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and EE 4. The new EE 4 is impressively different than the older EE 3, as the plugin has been revamped using a different structure to enable future growth and expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The developers aim to eventually move completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
To learn more about the plugin go here:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just some of the many benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your site:
Automated Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current online presence into a feature-rich and professional event management site … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using an online event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by literally eliminating the chore of processing registrations and bookings manually.
Basically, you are making it easier for attendees to enrol themselves.
Letting your participants to do all of the data themselves frees up your time and lets you direct more attention on organizing a more unique event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn shortly, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management and registration process that you want your users to experience.
Some additional benefits include the following:
- Reduced Costs: The Event Espresso plugin is a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to developing your own system or using a third-party provider. This is made possible by using a model where users start with the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and buy add ons only if you need added features.
- Increased Sales: Event Espresso lets you accept new signups 24/7. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing features and add ons (see below) let people who are interested in registering for your event share your information with friends who may also be interested.
- Green And Paperless Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, the event signup process can remain wholly online, eliminating traditional paper waste from tasks related to admin and record-storage.
- Own Your Data. You own all the information you collect from your event attendees.
Event Espresso Features
The Event Espresso software provides functionality to end-users via built-in features (these come with the plugin) and additional features that you can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso provides a number of great features to WordPress users. Here are just a few of these:
- Quick and easy to install and set up. Ready to use in no time.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso lets you create as many kinds of tickets as you want and specify different prices, limits on ticket quantities, etc.
- Custom Confirmation Emails. Configure automated registration and payment notification email messages to communicate with your participants.
- Ticket Selector. Present a number of ticket options to registrants and let them purchase the ticket(s) that will best fit their needs.
- Intelligent Single Page Checkout. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is smart, fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically duplicate the primary registrant’s details for any additional participants.
- Spam Protection. Prevent the likelihood of spammers and bots creating false registrations by using reCAPTCHA settings to provide human validation.
- Discount Codes. Leverage promotional and discount codes to incentivize prospects to register without hesitation, or make your offerings more affordable for others. This is also practical if you want to sell out events close to timelines.
- Event Check-In List. Generate a list of attendees and check in everyone who has attended.
- Event Manager Pre-approval. Be selective about who can register for your events.
- RSS Feeds. Provide automatic updates to customers, drive quality traffic and reach a wider number of prospects with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Draft (status) Events. Draft events allow you to develop an event over time without displaying it live on your website. You can keep editing your events until you are ready to publish it to your website, or schedule your event to publish at a later time and date.
- 15+ Languages. Event Espresso can be run in more than 15 languages, and more languages are being added all the time.
- Bulk Upload Event Information. Event Espresso 4 provides a CSV-based importing capability that enables you to upload a lot of event data all at one time. You can export, edit and import details about events, datetimes, ticketing information, pricing, custom registration questions, venues, terminology, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Multiple Event Attendee. EE 4 allows an individual or people to purchase multiple tickets and different ticket types at the same time. You decide how many attendees are allowed to enroll in a single registration session by specifying either limits on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- A Community Of Event Experts. Event Espresso gives you access to an expert community of event managers and other plugin users. You can network with other Event Espresso users using their community chat room, user support forums, job board, and social media pages on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Social Sharing. Event participants and your site visitors can tell others about your event using social share buttons.
- Transaction Reports. Event reports gives you information of your registrations and transactions, allowing you to track the performance of your events with the aggregate number of registrations and amount of revenue has been collected.
Additional features include:
- Hooks, Actions & Filters. These allow web-based software developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso plugin that are 100% compatible with the WordPress development platform.
- Metabox Management & Organization. Event Espresso leverages the WordPress user interface, which gives you the ability to reconfigure the user interface to match your workflow processes. Each control box can be collapsed, re-arranged or completely removed from your page.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value For Money: Event Espresso states on their website that their mission is to “empower business and organization leaders with the event registration, ticketing and management tools that maximize the success of events.” To achieve their goals, the company operates on a modular that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium version of Event Espresso also includes 40+ added features, including:
- Duplicating events – limits the need to re-enter event information when adding new events.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse the same group of questions for similar events.
- Default payment status.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As well as an incredible array of features, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow plugin users to further expand the capabilities of your event management system.
Some of these add-ons include:
- Events Grid Template Add-on: Displays events in a pure CSS grid-like structure using the featured image. Hovering over the image will display further information. If an event does not have a featured image, a default image will be used instead.
- Recurring Events Manager Addon: The Recurring Events management addon lets you put events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months in advance. You can add as many future events as you like. Event Espresso will automatically open and close registrations for all of these recurring events.
- Events Date Range Template Add on: The Date Range custom event list template enables your users to search for events that occur within a certain date range.
- Events Social Sharing Add on: Add social sharing features to the end of your Event Espresso “thank you” page that allows your registrants to post a message about their event registration on Twitter and Facebook after booking.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration add-on lets you take full advantage of the WordPress user system. With the WP User Integration addon you can give users a special incentive by offering member prices and overriding event prices when your members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered website users can have access to your special events. Members can also add personal information into their profile page allowing them fast registration for events by auto-filling in the personal information on the event booking form. Users can also view event history and pay for future events.
- Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Addon Editions: This addon lets you involve other users in your organization to help manage your events and give new users permission to create events or regional managers the ability to manage events. The Roles and Permissions Basic add-on allows you to manage & customize the WordPress users roles and allow them different permissions with different capabilities, allowing others to help you manage your events or the events that other people create. You can customize roles so that users do not have access to certain areas of your WordPress dashboard and/or certain sections of your Event Espresso settings. If you’d like to create geographic regions for other people to manage events, use the Roles and Permissions Pro add-on.
- EE4 Event Ticketing Addon: The Ticketing addon gives you the ability to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning addon gives you the capacity to scan ticket bar codes. The ticketing addon includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple bar code types are included for handling check-in scans at venues. People can either print out their tickets or display them on their mobile devices. The barcode scanner can be used for checking in or checking out attendees and to validate tickets.
- Events Table Template Addon: The Events Table Template add on provides you with a simple and easy-to-use system that allows you to change the look and feel of your event lists. It comes with a simple table template with category filters, table search, table paging and more. It also enables web developers to design custom templates using one of the templates provided as a base template.
- JSON API Add-on: The Event Espresso JSON API add on allows other applications, web tools, mobile applications, etc… to access your Event Espresso information through an API (Application Programming Interface).
Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software, including new add-ons.
To learn more about the newest Event Espreso features and add ons, check out the plugin here:
User Feedback
Here are some of the many great testimonials that customers have written about Event Espresso:
”My hope with this whole integration is to be able to show other school districts an affordable and easy solution to these registrations. I cannot believe how much money they are charged for less by other companies. This has the potential to save schools tens of thousands, which is huge right now.” Kelly, College Station Independent School District
”Probably the best event management plugin available.” Materia Inspiration Centre
”Event Espresso plugin still rocks. Saw you guys were up for the WP Honors too. Glad I paid for it! If you need event management on your WordPress site I recommend Event Espresso.” Patrick Allmond, Focus Consulting
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, teacher, concert promoter, or event management consultant, there are simply countless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, visit the support forum for inspiration and practical suggestions to streamline your event management process or enhance the experience of your event attendees.
Support
Event Espresso is compatible with most WordPress plugins and themes that follow WP coding standards. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great customer support, as so many of its satisfied customers attest:
“I’m really impressed with not only the application itself but the support. I have rarely seen such a responsive support staff than at EE. They rock…I highly recommend this plugin!” sock2me
The Event Espresso software provides amazing support with access to support forums, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledge base and how tos, one-on-one support and even a monthly VIP member pass giving you access to community of developers, designers, event managers, publishers and webmasters that use Event Espresso tools, plus faster support response times.
In addition, Event Espresso boasts a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress web developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely software you can depend on to run your events.
Software Pricing
Event Espresso is available in a number of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin options, however, you will want to consider downloading one of the premium plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This license option allows you to configure Event Espresso on one domain only. It includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License Edition – This license allows you to configure Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer License – This edition allows you to run Event Espresso on 5 domains. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
Pricing details of the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Currently, the plugin is being retailed for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest price: Event Espresso – Event Manager & Registration System For WordPress
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this review was written. This may not be the actual price charged by the plugin author when you visit the site.
Additional Info
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the plugin. Make sure to remain subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Search the plugin’s online documentation pages to find answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and visit the support forums for questions related to your particular use-case, or to report bugs and give feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product website.
The Bottom Line
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event booking and ticketing manager software, used and trusted by thousands of WP site owners.
If you own a WordPress-powered website and you plan to run an event that requires scheduling dates, times and venues, enrolling participants, and reserving tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a better WordPress plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – Event Manager & Ticket Registration Plugin For WordPress
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