Does your organization currently run or plan to run events that need managing bookings, such as workshops, group courses, non-profit fundraisers, social events, or even a large-scale event such as a food fair, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend or participate?
Co-ordinating event sign-ups can be a complicated and time-consuming process. You need to manage scheduling, dates, participant numbers, data collection, payment processing and invoicing, confirmations, reminders and notifications, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and providing tickets to event participants.
There are lots of advantages to setting up an online event registration system. It can streamline your business processes, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily reproduce previous events, give event managers more control, improve customer experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting up a web-based event booking system can be expensive.
Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-powered website or blog, you can set up an inexpensive and professional online event registration solution.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Management System
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily set up your event and begin accepting online registrations in a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and process online event bookings)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich application that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Event Espresso lets you customize registration forms
You can use various event registration strategies, from simple online registration and straight up selling tickets, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your attendees, or integrating your event bookings with social media and email marketing solutions.
Access detailed information about event attendees
Please Note: Currently, Event Espresso provides two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is completely different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the plugin is being revamped using a different structure to allow for future growth and expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The developers aim to eventually transition completely to EE 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
Go here to learn more:
Plugin Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your site:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current web site into a feature-rich and professional event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating capacity limits, multiple pricing levels and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Increased Business Productivity
By using an online event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by practically doing away with the need to process registrations and bookings manually.
Essentially, you are making it easier for participants to perform the enrolment process themselves.
Allowing your clients to do the data themselves frees you up from doing admin work and lets you invest more of your energy on organizing a more unique event.
Complete Control Over The User Experience
As you will discover in a moment, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management process that you want your customers to experience.
Some additional benefits and advantages include:
- Less Costs: The Event Espresso plugin provides you with a very inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to building your own solution or using a 3rd party service provider. The cost is kept to a minimum through a model where users start with the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then purchase add ons only when you need added functionality.
- Increased Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept new bookings 24 hrs a day. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social and marketing features and addons (see below) let people interested in attending your event invite others who may also be interested in attending.
- Green Event Sign-Up Process: With Event Espresso, your event sign-up process can remain wholly online, eliminating typical paper consumption from tasks associated with enrollment.
- Own Your Information. You own all the information you obtain from event attendees.
Event Espresso Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to its customers through standard features (these are included with the software) and optional features that customers can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many unique built-in to WordPress users. Here are just a few:
- Fast and easy to install and use. Ready to start accepting registrations in minutes.
- Multiple Times and Dates Per Event. In EE 4, events can have many dates and times (called datetimes), which these can be managed from one single event.
- Event Calendar. Registrants can easily see your events and add these to their schedule using a calendar.
- Tax Admin & Reporting Options. Event Espresso 4 gives you several options to handle taxes for your event and report tax fees to customers when purchasing tickets. Event managers can administer taxes globally and on a per-ticket basis.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration enables you to configure the display of Google Maps on the event listing and event details sections.
- Default Price Types. Price types let event managers create new prices that adjust the base ticket pricing for your system-default ticket.
- Discount Codes. Leverage promotional and multiple discount codes to incentivize people to make a purchasing decision immediately, or make your offers more attractive for price-sensitive customers. This is also practical if you want to sell out events close to timelines.
- Manual Registration. you have the option of booking event attendees at the door, or send in paper-based forms for manual submission later.
- Ticketless Events. Set up events without making it necessary for participants to book tickets. Use Event Espresso for all forms of events, not just those that require tickets.
- XML RSS Event Feeds. Keep your users up-to-date about your events, drive quality traffic and widen your content distribution with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Works With The Latest WordPress Version. The EE 4 user interface follows all WordPress guidelines to help you build highly aesthetic event pages that are responsive and mobile-friendly.
- Easy Event Management. Event Espresso puts you in full control of every aspect of your event’s registration and ticketing, and also allows you to automate the process with event management tools that include staff and venue management, custom event page designs, payment processing and handling, wait lists, attendee limits, print-ready tickets and more.
- Upload Event Data. Event Espresso 4 provides a CSV-based importing capability that allows you to import a lot of event data all at one time. You can export, edit and upload details about events, datetimes, ticketing details, pricing, custom registration questions, venues, terminology, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
- Register Multiple Participants. EE 4 allows one person or people to register multiple participants at the same time. You can control how many attendees can register in a single registration by specifying either limits on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- Automatic Plugin Upgrading. Event Espresso provides simple 1-click plugin upgrading to make sure that you have the newest features and to keep your installation working with new versions of WordPress.
- Social Sharing. Event registrants and your website visitors can help spread the word about your event using social media share buttons.
- Categorize Events. If you have several different event types like free and paid, workshops and breakout sessions, different types of programs and program modules, etc. you can categorize these to make it easier for your attendees to locate what they’re searching for. You can display all the events in a category on an event category page, make the events searchable by category, and color-code events on the Event Espresso events calendar to make them easier to find, as well as suggesting new events in the categories that interest your existing customers.
Additional features include:
- Hooks, Actions & Filters. These allow developers to implement safer and more reliable customizations and extensions to the Event Espresso application that are fully compatible with the WordPress software platform.
- Maintenance Mode. You can pause registration capabilities for normal site visitors whenever site maintenance is needed. You can continue to work on your event pages during maintenance mode.
- Flexibility, Autonomy And 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 objectives, the software has been built using a model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also includes 40+ additional features, including:
- Duplicating events – limits the need to re-enter event information when adding new events.
- Default surcharge (similar to adding a service tax to every ticket).
- Category titles and descriptions on event listings.
Event Espresso Add-Ons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow customers to significantly expand the capabilities of the event management system.
Some of these add ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add on: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display the scheduled events by location. There are 4 maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Dropdown Custom Template Addon: The Recurring Events Drop-down custom template lets you organize multiple datetime events into a drop-down list.
- Events Calendar Table Template Addon: The Calendar Table template is a list template with a bold date and customizable “register now” button. The template can be customized to display an event thumbnail instead of a date.
- Events Social Sharing Add on: This add-on adds 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 registration.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration addon allows you to take full advantage of the WP user system. With the WP User Integration add-on you can give users a special incentive by offering member pricing and overriding event prices when members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered users of the site will have access to your special events. Members can also store personal information into their profile page allowing them fast registration for events by auto-filling in the personal information on the event registration form. Users can also look up event history and pay for events.
- Roles And Permissions Basic And Pro Add-on Editions: This add-on lets you involve others in the event management process and give new users the capacity to create events or regional managers the ability to manage events. The Roles and Permissions Basic add-on allows you to manage & customize the WP users roles and assign them different permissions with different capabilities, so others can 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.
- Multiple Event Registration Add-on: The Multiple Event registration addon gives potential customers the ability to book multiple events at once. In each event listing registrants will be given the option to either register for a single event or add multiple events to their shopping cart. With the Multi-Event Registration add on, attendees can register for several events at once and even add additional attendees to any of the same events in the same checkout process.
- EE4 Events Table View Template Add on: The Events Table Template add-on gives you an easy-to-use system that allows you to edit 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 allows developers to build their own custom templates using one of the included templates as a source template.
- Infusionsoft Integration Add on: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft integration all-in-one sales and marketing software addon, you can easily automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture event attendee data, track bookings, and accept payments from your website.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to the software, including new addons.
For more details about the latest Event Espreso features and add ons, visit the plugin website:
User Feedback
Below are some of the many testimonials that customers have written about Event Espresso:
”Tri-South, Inc is using Event Espresso to manage the course catalog, event ticketing, and class registration. [As their developer] I have customized a few items to make the site and plugin a seamless integration. The client is very pleased!” Jenifer Design
”…it really does blow everything else that’s out there out of the water.” Chris Reynolds, Arcane Palette Creative Design
”I can’t even imagine what I would want the plugin to do that it doesn’t already do. I’m really happy with the features.” Jim Harmer, Improve Photography
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are a motivational speaker, trainer, workshop promoter, or event professional, there are just endless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso plugin.
After purchasing the plugin and becoming a registered user, search the user forum for tips and practical ways to improve your event management workflow or enhance the experience of your event attendees.
Event Espresso Support
Event Espresso is compatible with most WP plugins and themes that follow WP coding standards. If you do need support with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent user support, as so many of its end-users confirm:
”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.” Mark Wigston, Muskoka Graphics
The Event Espresso plugin provides comprehensive support with access to a support forum, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, email support and even a monthly VIP member pass that gives you access to community of developers, designers, event managers, publishers and webmasters that use Event Espresso tools, plus faster support response times.
Additionally, Event Espresso boasts an established team of experienced WordPress web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can depend on to manage your events.
Software Pricing
Event Espresso is available in various plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (called Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software functionality, however, you need to consider downloading one of the ”Pro” plugin versions below:
- Personal Edition – This license option allows you to configure Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
- Everything License – This edition enables you to run Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This lets you run Event Espresso on five sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
The price of the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Presently, the plugin is selling for the amounts shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Espresso
Please Note: The pricing above was current at the time this review was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin seller when you visit the site.
Additional Plugin Information
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.
Use the plugin’s documentation tools to find answers to common questions about setup and using Event Espresso, and visit the support forums if you have questions related to your particular situation, or to notify developers about problems and leave feedback.
For all documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the preferred WP event booking and ticketing management plugin, used by thousands of people.
If you own a WordPress web site and you plan to run events that involve scheduling dates and venues (offline and online), enrolling attendees, or booking seating, then you will probably not find a better software for your needs than Event Espresso.
For full details, visit the plugin website: Event Espresso
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