What's new in Elevent

The Elevent Event Ticketing WordPress plugin is all growed up! Introducing Version 2: A major restructuring and optimization pass that sets this plugin up for great things in the future.

ALERT: This is a major update, a full-version update. Test this in a staging or sandbox environment first. After updating, we strongly advise doing a full sync to make sure your events continue to display correctly

New Look Settings Page

A lot of what we're excited about you won't see--yet. But the Elevent plugin settings screen and the syncing process gets a total overhaul.

Right from the get-go, the plugin's Settings page is unrecognizeable. But it's a lot more than a facelift.

Syncing Reimagined

Instead of syncing your entire schedule each and every time, you can decide at any time to only sync specific events of your choosing. Great for spot updates and granular control.

Syncing gets more efficient--if an event hasn't changed, it'll get skipped on the next sync. Want to refresh every upcoming event and showtime--whether they've changed recently or not? Go ahead and run a full sync--this'll ignore any checks to skip over events that haven't changed and pull in everything in Elevent as it is today.

Manually kick-off additional updates--like a check to set any future & past events to their most recent status or clear out the Calendar cache. This'll help you speed along the correct end-user display despite all the performance-enhancing measures the plugin takes.

Elevent Widget Speedups

We've employed a bunch of optimizations to load Elevent widgets faster and more reliably. Fewer and shorter spinning "e" wheels. And we have more planned in the next 1-2 mini-releases.

What's next

This is a major reworking of the plugin as a whole. This is the basis to start churning out more visual and interactive features in the plugin in a more high-performing, supportable way. So keep any eye out for:

• Expanding our blocks & shortcodes and the settable properties they have
• Drag & drop blocks to embed the sales of more than tickets: donations, passes, pages, memberships, and more.
• Prettying up some complex, self-contained mega-blocks like a glossed-up calendar and event grid & list

Here's the full changelog for the WordPress Plugin v2:

Added

• A new admin UI for plugin configuration and import workflows.
• An option to import a single event or a selected subset of events instead of always importing the full catalog.
• Import UI indicators that show which Elevent events are new and do not yet have corresponding WordPress posts.
• A calendar cache system that stores filtered calendar views and refreshes them when events change or a batch import completes.
• A new Maintenance and Tools admin section for troubleshooting and operational tasks.
• Manual controls to run the event status update cron job and full sync cron job from the admin UI.
• A manual control to force-refresh the calendar cache from the admin UI.
• Standardized logging across the plugin to improve debugging and operational visibility.
• Clearer admin UI feedback for settings changes that may affect imports.
• Saved-settings confirmation in the admin UI.
• Export of import summaries as CSV from the admin workflow.
• A more detailed import summary UI showing success and failure states.
• Drill-down import results for individual events and showtimes, including links to live event pages during import review.
• A troubleshooting option to copy the JSON returned from Elevent to the clipboard.

Changed

• Default import behavior now only creates or updates events and showtimes that have been modified in Elevent.
• The modified-record-only import flow can be overridden by selecting theFull Synchronizationoption when a full re-sync is needed.
• Import workflows are now oriented around incremental updates instead of re-upserting all events on every import.
• Calendar views now use cached filtered results instead of rebuilding every view directly from WordPress showtime queries.
• Key plugin behaviors such as imports and WordPress post lookups now emit consistent warning and error logs.

Fixed

• Placeholder for fixes that will ship with v2.0.0.
• Improved fallback handling for common WordPress and data integrity issues so problems are logged and handled safely instead of breaking page rendering.
• Broken showtime-to-event relationships are now logged defensively instead of causing fatal errors that prevent other events from rendering.

Breaking

Import behavior has changed from full upsert-on-every-import to modified-record-only syncing by default.

This is a small patch to fix a single bug. This patch fixes the way Brands were importing so they always populate the correct brand(s) for events and showtimes.

Brands are a great way to automatically surface specific events on specific pages/calendars on your website.

With WordPress Version 1.6.0, we introduce some very welcome functionality--creating multi-part events gets a lot easier and they show more accurate timing and location info. We also add a long-awaited feature: the ability to sync html and formatted content from Elevent events into WordPress.

We also squashed some bugs, including a huge one that'll help guard against breaking your events if you find yourself fiddling with events and showtimes and the way they depend on each other.

Multi-part Events Truth Serum

Multi-part events are events that are composed of multiple, separate events like short films, one-act plays, individual comics, DJs, or opening acts. Tickets are sold to the block/line-up/program, but each individual work or performer has their own searchable landing page as well.

Because each 'sub-event' gets a full landing page and all of the images and info to feature them on your website, you still create events and schedule some sort of showtime to make them automatically sync into your website. That could cause some confusing display language around when and where each sub-event really happens--since it's really just a part of the multi-part event--that full program where tickets are sold.

Now, whenever a sub-event is part of a multi-event, each sub-event automatically inherit all the correct info from the multi-part event. They keep the info about the actual artists and the work, but the when and where all come from the multi-part event, like the venue, date, and start time.

Now, you don't have to care about when and how you schedule those sub-events. As long as they are in the near-future, they'll look and work like you want them to without another thought.

Revisit multi-part events here.

Import Custom HTML on Events

One of the few informational fields about Events that couldn't automatically sync into the website is this Custom HTML field.

Now, even formatted custom HTML from this field can securely sync into your website--a great option for those extended descriptions, summaries, bios, or programmer's notes.

Note: only text formatting is supported in this field--no images or embedded videos).

To actually see this field on your event landing pages, be sure to add this new field to your event page template(s).

Learn about customizing your event landing page templates here.

Special Bug Fix - Events Don't Need Showtimes

The #1 way we saw people causing ugly page errors was manually deleting either an event or a showtime without deleting both. An event or showtime without a partner would fail, well, ungracefully. Now, even if you manually delete one, you won't accidentally cause larger issues.

Quicker Auto-sync intervals

Now you have an option to sync your Elevent events every 30 minutes instead of the default sync, hourly. To activate, simply select the 30 min option from the sync interval section when you enable Auto Sync.

If you have a deep schedule, tread carefully with this setting. You may get throttled or your website may time out.

Bug Fixes:

• Refactoring to use wp_remote for API calls instead of Httpful and cUrl combination
• Log cleanup, fewer warnings
• Refactoring of event sync

We created the option in Event Calendars to easily hide sub-events from displaying. The default calendar behaviour now hides sub-events. No more workarounds needed.

Bug Fixes:

Moved acf-field-group call for blocks to correct position; resolved conflicts with standalone ACF installations

The Elevent Calendar block and shortcode have come a long way--revisit them here.

An assortment of improvements, most aren't very noticeable:

• In the Account block, hide the Manage Membership menu option if no link exists
• Added Elementor Template JSON in the Elementor Widgets folder - this makes it easier to import the latest started event landing page template in Elementor
• Added new test infrastructure
• Updated Account Login Gutenberg and Elementor blocks
• Refactored the multi-part-event shortcode
• Updated 3rd party libraries

Fix to make the 'Hide Legend' option function correctly on List mode (showtime buttons) on event landing pages.

Version 1.4 of our Elevent Event Ticketing WordPress plugin makes the website integration far more hands-off.

Brands

Last year, we introduced brands as a way to group your products into different brands--the way customers experience these grouped-up concepts, how they report, and how you manage them in the Back Office.

Now, Brands integrate into your WordPress website. The major benefit? Have different parts of your website display events from different brands in totally different places without touching your website.

For example: You might have a year-round season and a special festival one month. You could consider those 2 different brands in Elevent.

On your website, you can feature your year-round season front and center--including or excluding the festival. You could also have a dedicated page for just the festival, where the only events that display are festival-branded events.

The festival/season/series taxonomy in WordPress remains--that's one you can always use within WordPress to group events together. If you want it to automatically categorize event groupings from what you set up in Elevent, brands is the answer.

Elevent event blocks and shortcodes, any event grid or listing you have, sliders, and carousels can all filter events/showtimes by brand.

You can even specify a brand in an URL to prefilter a general calendar to one brand.

Featured Images Update Automatically

Before, when the WordPress site first synced new events, it would import whatever first featured image was found. If the image changed in Elevent, you'd have to update in WordPress separately.

We did this to prevent multiple copies of images from cluttering up your media library and storage.

Now, if a different event featured image is detected from Elevent, those images will update themselves in WordPress automatically.

Hide Legend Option on Showtime List

The Showtime List block or shortcode is the real ticketing widget on event landing pages. By default, showtime buttons are color-coded to show which are sold out, members-only, etc.

It's now possible to hide that legend entirely if it's not helpful.

Some assorted bugs were also fixed, including:

• The Elementor Calendar block wasn't displaying
• The venue name is now hidden when all showtimes at that venue are filtered out
• Fixed a bug where events were set to pending when they were just put off-sale and re-synced based on UTC time

Bug fixes:

• Fix double slash in CSS link.

WordPress Plugin v1.3.1

Bug fixes

• Hide Sponsor heading from Elementor if there are no sponsors on the post
• Fixed the shortcode [elevent_promo_event_date] so it properly shows a date range instead of individual dates for events that are offered on more than 3 days.