Do you currently run or plan to run events that need co-ordinating registrations, such as workshops, training classes, not-for-profit fundraisers, marketing functions, or even a large-scale event like a music show, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to register to attend?
Managing event bookings is a complicated and time-consuming process. You will probably need to manage calendar schedules, available dates and spaces, participant numbers, data entry, payments and invoicing, confirmations and reservations, reminders and notifications, cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and issuing tickets to participants.
There are lots of benefits to setting up an online event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and reduce expenses, help you easily duplicate similar events, give event managers more control, improve customer experience and increase your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be quite costly.
Fortunately, if you run a WordPress-powered website or blog, you can easily set up a very inexpensive and highly professional online event registration solution.
Introducing …
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Manager System
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration WP software enables you to easily schedule your event and start receiving bookings literally in minutes.
(Set up multiple events and take online registrations with Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed application that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
Create custom event registration forms
You can employ various event registration strategies, from simple online sign-ups and straight up ticket-selling, to setting up custom registration forms for collecting detailed information about your attendees, or integrating your event registration forms with social media and autoresponders.
Access detailed information about your event attendees
Important: Currently, Event Espresso offers two different versions of their plugin: EE 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new EE 4 is impressively different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the plugin is being rebuilt using a different structure to accommodate future growth. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and pricing. The company plans to eventually move completely to Event Espresso 4, so keep this in mind as you read more about this plugin.
Learn more about the plugin here:
Benefits Of Using Event Espresso
Here are just some 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 existing website or blog into an automated and fully featured event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to attendee limits, multiple pricing options and discount codes, to printable tickets and even seating charts.
Better Business Productivity
By using a web-based event registration solution like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by virtually eliminating the need to process registrations manually.
Essentially, you are facilitating participants to register themselves.
Allowing your attendees to do all of the data entry frees you up from doing admin work and lets you spend more of your attention on creating a more enjoyable event.
More Control Over The User Experience
As you will soon discover, Event Espresso gives you more control over the event management process that you want your attendees to experience.
Some additional benefits of the plugin include:
- Less Costs: The Event Espresso plugin gives you an inexpensive online event registration management solution compared to other options or using a 3rd-party service. This is made possible by using a model where you pay for the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and purchase addons only if you need additional features.
- More Sales: Event Espresso allows you to accept new bookings 24/7. In addition, Event Espresso social and marketing features and addons (see below) let people interested in attending your event invite other people they know who may be interested in attending.
- Paperless Event Registration Process: With Event Espresso, the event signup process remains entirely online, eliminating typical paper consumption from tasks related to administration.
- All Data Belongs To You. You control all the information you obtain from event attendees.
Plugin Features
Event Espresso delivers functionality to end-users through standard features (these come with the plugin) and optional features that users can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many built-in to WordPress users. Here are just a few:
- Quick and simple to install and set up. Ready to start accepting registrations in minutes.
- Multiple Ticket And Pricing Options. Event Espresso lets you configure as many different types of tickets as you need and set separate prices, ticket quantity limits, and more.
- Event Calendar. Customers can easily find your events and add these to their schedule with a calendar.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso integrates with payment gateways, enabling you to collect registration payments before running your events.
- Google Maps. Google Maps integration enables you to customize the settings of Google Maps on the event listing and event details sections.
- Default Price Types. Price types let you create new prices that adjust the default ticket price of your system-default ticket.
- Discount & Promotional Codes. Set up promotional and multiple discount codes to encourage people to register immediately, or simply make your offerings more appealing for others. This is also practical if you want to sell-out events close to timelines.
- Contact Profiles & Contact List. EE 4 lets you know who your clients are and how they have done business with you.
- Administrative Pre-approval. Be selective about who can attend your events.
- Event RSS Feeds. Automatically update your site visitors, bring in more visitors and widen your content distribution with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- Works With The Most Recent WP Version. The Event Espresso 4 user interface follows the WordPress guidelines to help you build beautiful event pages that are easier to use and mobile-friendly.
- Easy Event Management. Event Espresso puts event managers in complete control of all aspects of your event’s registration and ticketing processes, and lets you automate this process with event management tools that include staff and venue manager, customizable event page designs, payment processing, wait lists, limits on attendees, print-ready ticketing and more.
- Default Tickets. If you create similar tickets for your events, you can set one of those tickets as your default ticket for the next time you create an event simply by ticking a checkbox.
- Venue Profiles. The venue manager in Event Espresso 4 lets information about venues to appear throughout the Event Espresso admin and the public areas of your site to inform attendees of the location of your event. The venue record displays many standard WP settings such as tags, categories, discussion settings, comments, etc., but also displays venue information such as venue capacity, venue website, phone number, venue address, Google map, etc. You can also display venue profiles throughout various locations on your WordPress theme and on a venue listing page on your website where you can set up and publish venue profiles for multiple events or display every event you have booked for a given venue.
- A Community Of Event Experts. Event Espresso lets you network with an expert community of event managers and other plugin users. You can engage 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+.
- Invoice Payment Reminders. Follow-up potential event clients who have not paid yet for their booking with a standard but personalized invoice with just one click of a button. Your invoices will reference registered customers who have not paid their registration yet by name, display the amount owing, and include a link to the event, a payment link and a url to download a PDF invoice.
- Accurate Event Participant Manager. You control your participants’ records; who has enrolled, which event they have booked and how much they have paid. With the attendee manager, you can get an overview of registered participants and their payment status, easily add/edit attendee records and payments, export a list of attendees to an Excel spreadsheet for additional uses, send customizable payment reminders and receipts and send messages to your attendees individually or as a group.
Additional features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming. Event Espresso is simple enough for most WP users, and also robust and customizable for higher end users and web-based software developers. The bottom line is that by using Object-oriented programming (OOP), EE 4 enables more complex developments and customizations to the application.
- Full Logging & Remote Logging. EE 4 allows you to generate a log file with debugging data that can be useful for developers who are diagnosing problems.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value For Money: According to the philosophy stated on their site, Event Espresso’s objective 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 as a result.
The premium edition of Event Espresso also includes 40+ added features, including:
- Duplicating events – simplifies the work of re-entering event data 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
In addition to an incredible array of features, Event Espresso provides “add-ons”, which allow users to further expand the functionality of events.
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 the event does not have a featured image available, it will use a default image.
- Recurring Events Manager Addon: The Recurring Events manager addon allows you to put events on autopilot by scheduling repeated events weeks or months … even years ahead. You can create as many classes, meetings, courses and conferences in advance as you like. Event Espresso will then automatically open and close bookings for all of these recurring events.
- Events Category Accordion Template Add-on: The Category Accordion template displays event categories as a simple list. Clicking on a category name shows all events related to that category and closes any previously open categories.
- Social Coupons Integration Addon: If your web site is featured on Groupon.com you can easily accept Groupon codes to your events. You can even specify whether events accept the social coupons or not.
- WP User Integration: The WP User Integration add-on lets you take advantage of the WordPress user system. With the WP User Integration add-on you can give your users a special incentive by offering member pricing and overriding event pricing when members are logged in. You can even set up member-only events where only registered users of the site will have access to these special events. Members can also input personal details into their profile page allowing them to quickly register for events by auto-filling in their personal information on the event registration form. Your users can also view previous events and pay for events.
- Seating Chart Add on: The seating chart addon is great for venues and events that sell and reserve seats for attendees in advance. This is perfect for venues and events such as theaters, concert halls, play houses, sports arenas and stadiums. The Seating Chart addon allows you to offer reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues from your WordPress website. The Seating Chart add on lets you manage the environment for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to every seat.
- Multi-Event Registration Addon: The Multi-Event registration add-on gives potential attendees the ability to register for 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.
- Events Calendar Add-on: This add-on uses the WP calendar to display events and event categories via an attractive graphical calendar.
- JSON API Add-on: The new Event Espresso JSON API add on permits other software applications, online tools, mobile applications, etc… to access your Event Espresso data through an API (Application Programming Interface).
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its plugin, including new add ons.
For more information about the newest Event Espreso features and add ons, check out the plugin here:
User Feedback
Below are a few of the many testimonials that plugin users have posted about Event Espresso:
”My clients have used Event Espresso for Transportation (Cadet Bus for leave), Parties (tailgates and brewery tours), and Horse-back riding lessons and camps. What a terrific plug-in and fantastic support from Seth!” Nina, Blue Iris Web Design
”Customizing an Event Registration plugin for WordPress by @EventEspresso. Love the pro version. Highly Recommended!” Joshua Garity
”You guys have done an AWESOME job with this system…promise me to keep up the excellent work you guys are doing, for as long as you can… Respect!” Robert Jarnroth, Jarnroth Digital Productions
Plugin Tips
Whether you are a gym owner, trainer, conference promoter, or event professional, there are simply countless possibilities of what you can achieve with the Event Espresso software.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, search the support forum for new ideas and practical suggestions to streamline your event management workflow and enhance the experience of your attendees.
Event Espresso Support
Event Espresso is compatible with all WordPress plugins and themes that follow standard WordPress development rules. If you do need help with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides highly responsive customer support, as many of its satisfied plugin end-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
The Event Espresso plugin provides great support including access to a support forum, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, premium 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.
In addition, Event Espresso boasts a well-staffed team of experienced WordPress web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely software you can count on to manage your events.
Plugin Cost
Event Espresso is available in various plugin editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software features, however, you need to consider using one of the paid plugin editions below:
- Personal License – This allows you to configure Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything Licensing – This option allows you to run Event Espresso on one site only. It includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium addons and one year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This lets you install Event Espresso on 5 sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $249.95.
The price of the Event Espresso plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. When we last checked, the plugin retails for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticketing Registration System For WordPress
Please Note: The above reflects the pricing at the time this review was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin author when you visit the site.
Event Espresso – Additional Information
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software. Make sure to register for their newsletter when you visit their site to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the plugin’s online 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 a particular situation, or to report bugs and give feedback.
For detailed installation and support documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso product site.
We Recommend
Event Espresso is the leading WordPress event registration and ticketing manager software, used and trusted by thousands of event managers.
If you own a WordPress-powered web site and you intend to run an event that involves scheduling dates and venues (offline and online), registering attendees, and/or booking tickets, then you will probably not find a better solution for your needs than Event Espresso.
For more details, check out the plugin here: Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Management
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