Event Espresso - WordPress Event Management Plugin

Do you currently run or plan to run events that need handling bookings, such as workshops, community courses, not-for-profit fundraisers, social conferences, or even a big event like a concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend or participate?

Managing event bookings can be a complex process. You will probably have to co-ordinate event schedules, event dates, registration numbers, data processing and storage, payments and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special requests and issuing tickets to participants.

There are lots of advantages to setting up a web-based event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower costs, help you easily duplicate similar events, give event managers more control, create a more enjoyable user experience and increase your sales.

The problem is that setting this up can be costly.

Fortunately, if you own a WordPress-powered site, you can install an inexpensive and professional online event booking solution.

Introducing …

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Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticket Registration System For WordPress

Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticket Registration System For WordPress

Plugin Description

The Event Espresso online event registration WP software allows you to easily set up an event and begin processing online bookings in just a few minutes.

(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and receive online registrations)

Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed application that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.

Create custom event registration forms

You can use a number of event registration strategies, from simple online bookings and straight up selling tickets, to creating custom registration forms in order to better understand your event attendees, or integrating your event bookings with an autoresponder system for ongoing follow-ups.

View detailed information about event attendees

Note: At the time of writing this article, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their plugin: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is considerably different than the older Event Espresso 3, as it has been redeveloped using a different structure to allow for future expansion. The Event Espresso 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The company plans to eventually retire EE 3, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.

Learn more here:

Event Espresso – Event Manager & Ticketing Registration System For WordPress

Benefits Of Using Event Espresso

Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website:

Automated Event Registration Management And Ticketing Solution

Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your existing online presence into a feature-rich and professional event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to seating limits, multiple price options and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.

Higher Business Productivity

By using a web-based event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by literally eliminating the need to process registrations manually.

Essentially, you are facilitating attendees to enroll by themselves.

Letting your enrollees to do the data themselves frees up your time and lets you invest more time on delivering a more unique event.

More Control Over The User Experience

As you will learn shortly, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management and booking process that you want your users to experience.

Additional benefits of the plugin include:

Reduced Costs: The Event Espresso plugin gives you an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a third-party service. The cost is kept low through a model where Event Espresso users buy the core plugin (which suits the requirements of most users) and then buy add ons only when you need new functionality.
Increased Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online signups any time of day or night. Not only that, but, Event Espresso social and marketing features (see below) let people interested in registering for your event share your information with others who may be interested in attending.
Green Event Booking Process: With Event Espresso, the event registration process can be kept entirely online, eliminating traditional paper consumption from tasks related to administration.
Own Your Information. You own all the information collected from your event participants.

Features

The Event Espresso software delivers functionality to users through standard features (these are included with the software) and optional features that you can buy for an added cost, called add-ons.

Event Espresso offers many features to website owners. Here are just a few:

Fast and simple to install and use. Be up and running in no time.
Custom Event Registration Forms. With Event Espresso you can collect specific data using a custom event registration form on your website to plan a unique experience for your users.
Customizable Event Designs. Customize your events and signup page using Event Espresso’s template options and components, and HTML or CSS.
Ticket Selector. Present multiple ticket options to prospects so they can choose the ticket(s) that best suits their needs.
Intelligent Single Page Checkout Process. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically duplicate the primary attendee’s registration details for any added attendees.
Spam Protection. Reduce the likelihood of spamming and robots creating bogus registrations on your website with reCAPTCHA features that authenticate human activity.
Mobile Registration & Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system enables you to validate tickets, speed up in-venue registrations, set up multiple check-in “stations” and track event participants.
Event Check-In List. Generate a list of participants and check-in everyone who attends.
Event Manager Pre-approval. Control who can and cannot register for your events.
XML RSS Feeds. Provide automatic updates to users, bring in more visitors and widen your content distribution with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
Works With The Most Up-To-Date Version Of WordPress. The EE 4 user interface follows the WordPress guidelines to help you build highly aesthetic event pages that are responsive and mobile-friendly.
Your Organization Settings. you can configure your organization’s profile to be deployed throughout the software and your WordPress themes. Your organization information include: business name, address, city, state, country, zip code, email, telephone, tax number, your logo, Facebook URL, Twitter profile URL, LinkedIn profile URL, Pinterest URL, Google+ profile URL, Instagram profile URL.
Upload Events. EE 4 provides a CSV-based importing feature that allows you to import a lot of event data all at one time. You can export, edit and upload data for events, datetimes, tickets, prices, registration questions, venue info, terms, taxonomies, term relationships and more.
Venue Profiles. The venue manager feature in Event Espresso 4 allows details about a venue to be published throughout the Event Espresso admin and the front end of your site to inform attendees of the location of your event. The venue profile displays many standard WP settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also lets you add venue information like venue seating capacity, venue site URL, phone number, venue address, maps, etc. You can also list venues in various parts on your WordPress theme and on a venue archive page on your site where you can set up and display venue profiles for multiple events or display all the events for a particular venue.
Registrant Profiles. Manage your registrant’s profile information and payment history and keep all of their data organized and easily within reach.
Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential event attendees who have not fully paid for their enrollment with a standard but personalized invoice with just one click of a button. Your invoices will address registered attendees who have not paid their registration yet by name, give them the balance owing, and include a link to the event details, a payment link and a link where they can download the invoice.
Event Posts. Publish your events using pages or posts and take advantage of WordPress custom post types. You can even customize your page templates to display event information in your own unique way.

Additional features include:

Object-Oriented Programming. Event Espresso is simple enough for basic WP users, and also robust and customizable for enterprise-level users and developers. The bottom line is that by using OOP, Event Espresso 4 facilitates more complex enhancements and customizations to the plugin.
Metabox Management And Organization. Event Espresso leverages the WordPress user interface, which brings the ability to organize the user interface to match your workflow process. Each meta box can be collapsed, re-arranged or entirely deleted from your page.
Flexibility, Autonomy And Value For Money: According to the philosophy stated on their site, Event Espresso’s aim is to “empower business and organization leaders with the event registration, ticketing and management tools that maximize the success of events.” To achieve their mission, the software has been built using a modular that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money as a result.

The premium edition of Event Espresso also comes with over 40 additional features, including:

Email shortcodes that includes participant data in confirmation emails and email newsletters.
Question groups that simplify the process of reusing the same questions for similar events.
Option to skip the confirmation page in registration.

Event Espresso Add-Ons

In addition to a very large range of features, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow end-users to significantly expand the capabilities of the event management system.

Some of these add-ons include:

EE4 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 the event does not have a featured image available, a default image will be used.
Recurring Events Manager Addon: The Recurring Events management addon allows you to put your events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months ahead. You can schedule as many classes, meetings, courses and conferences in advance as you want. Event Espresso will automatically open and close bookings for all of these recurring events.
Events Category Accordion Template Add-on: The Category Accordion template shows event categories as a simple list. Clicking on a category name displays all events associated with that category and closes any previously open categories.
Social Coupons Integration Add on: If your web site uses Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can even specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
Custom Files Addon: The Custom Files add-on provides PHP files that let you bypass certain aspects of the plugin.
Roles And Permissions Basic & Pro Add on Versions: This addon lets you involve your staff in the event management process and give new users the capacity to create events or regional managers the capacity to manage events. The Roles and Permissions Basic add-on allows you to manage & customize the WP users roles and give them different permissions with different privileges, so others can help you manage your events or events that other people create. You can customize roles so that a user does not have access to certain sections of your WP 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 add-on gives you the capacity to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning addon adds the capacity to scan ticket barcodes. The ticketing add on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple barcode types are included for managing check-in scans at the venue door. Registrants can either print out their tickets or display them on their mobile devices. The mobile app can be used for checking in or checking out attendees and to validate tickets.
EE4 Events Table Template Add-on: The Events Table Template add on provides you with an easy-to-use system that allows you to edit the design of your event lists. It comes with a simple table template with category filters, table search, table paging and more. It also allows web developers to build custom templates using one of the templates included as a base template.
JSON API Addon: The new Event Espresso JSON API addon enables other applications, web sites, mobile apps, etc… to access your Event Espresso details through an Application Programming Interface (API).

Note: Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to its plugin, including new addons.

For more information about the latest Event Espreso features and add ons, check out the plugin here:

Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Management

Customers – Feedback

Here are some of the many great testimonials that satisfied users have written about Event Espresso:

”Event Espresso rocks! I use it for my dance class registrations. Unlike most dance studios where people have to call or send an email in advance, Event Espresso puts a registration form right there in front of the user and allows me to collect valuable information from the user during the registration process with custom questions such as “Do you have previous dance experience?” or “How did you hear about us?”. It also gives my site a professional look and feel.” Ral, Ral’eau Salsa Dance Company
”I have been using Event Espresso to run my festival and have been very happy with how it has worked out. They have provided tremendous support and their iPhone app is amazing and easy to use. I suggest using it for your event.” Alex Grant, Byron Spirit Festival
”Thank you, we just did 2 sell out seminars of 50 attendees in 48 hours using Event Espresso and it was awesome. My wife was able to pick up on the processing backend with ease. You have done a great job on getting this system together – very simple, clear and well laid out With powerful functionality. I am so glad I dumped the old booking application we had and gave Event Espresso a go. Just wanted to say thanks, and thanks for the very patient, friendly and speedy assistance in helping me to get it all set up at the start. Many thanks to you and your team. A grateful customer.” Nicholas de Castella, Emotional Intelligence Trainings

Plugin Tips

Whether you are a motivational speaker, presenter, event planner, or event consultant, there are simply endless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.

After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a registered owner, spend a little time visiting the forums for tips and practical suggestions to streamline your event management process and improve the experience of your event attendees.

Support

Event Espresso is compatible with other WP plugins and themes that follow WP coding standards. If you experience issues with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides great technical support, as so many of its users confirm:

”Your plugin saved our client nearly $9000 in development costs because it handled the majority of the functionality we were looking for at a much lower cost. EventEspresso’s staff have been very responsive to our needs when we have them (which has been rare, because the plugin is so well coded). Great job on a great plugin!” Brandon P., Experience Farm

Event Espresso provides incredible support that includes access to support forums, 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 developers with a proven track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can count on to run and manage your events.

Plugin Price

Event Espresso is available in a range of plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (referred to as Event Espresso Decaf). For support and advanced plugin features, however, you should consider using one of the paid plugin editions below:

Personal License Edition – This enables you to run Event Espresso on 1 domain only. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $69.95.
Everything Licensing – This license option allows you to set up Event Espresso on 1 site only. Pricing includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
Developer Edition – This lets you set up Event Espresso on 5 sites. Price includes 51+ Premium features, (add-ons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.

The cost to purchase the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Currently, the software sells for the prices shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the latest pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticket Registration System For WordPress

Note: The above reflects the pricing when this article was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin developer when you visit the site.

Additional Information

Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the plugin. Make sure to stay subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.

Search the software’s documentation pages for answers to common questions about setting up and how to use Event Espresso, and the support forums if you have questions related to your particular situation, or to notify developers about bugs and leave feedback.

For all installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso web site.

We Recommend

Event Espresso is the preferred WP event registration and ticketing manager software, used and trusted by thousands of companies.

If you are a WordPress site owner and you plan to run an event that involves managing dates, times and venues (offline and online), booking participants, and selling tickets, then you will probably not find a more suitable plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.