What's new in Elevent

With version 1.3.0 of the Elevent Event Ticketing WordPress plugin, we introduce a few significant new features to help more easily create and manage events not everyone should see. By tightening the integration between Elevent Sale Locations and your WordPress website, we've made it easier to control event visibility on any grids, lists, calendars, or sliders you have on your website.

Hidden Showtimes

Sometimes you need to create events on your website that just aren't ready to be seen by anyone but you. Sure, you could sync them and unpublish them on the website, but that's a bit tedious and you had to temporarily disable syncing or risk republishing those events to the public.

An event is visible when it has one or more showtimes in the future--and those showtimes should be visible. Now, if all of an event’s showtimes are set to Sale Location: Hidden, that tells the WordPress plugin to go ahead and create/update that event—but don’t let it be seen by anyone.

In WordPress, you’ll see that ‘Hidden’ events are then:

• Set to WordPress status: Draft
• Set to Elevent Event Status: Pending
• All hidden showtimes will not appear in the Elevent event calendar blocks/shortcodes

To take events live when you are ready, you need only update the Sale Location of Showtimes in Elevent. Most commonly, you’d update them to Private (your website only) or Web & Box Office (Everywhere); on next sync, events and showtimes will become visible.

If you have event listings, grids, layouts, or carousels on your website, you should review how you filter out events. WordPress Draft status should keep them displaying everywhere, but it’s recommended to also filter out Elevent Events in an Elevent Status of Pending or Past Event (unless it’s an archive page).

Unlisted Events

If you have a ticketable event that you want to exist on your WordPress site but not show up in the Event Grids / Lists / Calendars you have an easier way to make that happen within WordPress:

In an Elevent Event, in the 'Configured in WordPress' tab, there’s a new toggle: Unlisted event.

Toggle on to hide the event from anyone who doesn’t know the link - any event grids / lists / and/or calendars. Showtimes to the event may still be on sale, if that’s how it’s set up.

Note: Since any event listings, grids, lists, or carousels can be custom-filtered by your website, it’s important to exclude these Unlisted events from those filters. The Elevent calendar blocks & shortcodes will do so automatically.

Responsive Time Slot Datepicker

If you have events that are of type time_slot (e.g., gallery/museum entry) the mobile view date picker now displays in a responsive manner:

1. It defaults to show the first available entry date (instead of showing all dates)
2. All other dates are in a scrollable date picker
3. Clicking on a date takes you to that single date's time slots.

Watch this space for an even better version of time slot choosing UI--we have something in the works.

Improved Date Filtering in Event Lists

Before, when filtering an event list to a single date, it would display all events with a showtime on that date—but still show all showtime buttons for those events, even if they were on different dates.

To simplify the display, when the user filters to a single date, only buttons for showtimes on that filtered date will display.

Note: On-demand, streaming virtual events are awkward logic for date filtering to a single date. Virtual showtimes will not show when filtered to a date within their viewing period.

Sandbox Support

If you are in a higher pricing tier, you may have access to an Elevent sandbox. You can flip your website to connect to an Elevent sandbox by checking the box in Elevent plugin settings.

Other minor fixes:

• Converted all links to Elevent files to the new elevent.app extension and CDN provider
• Fixed a bug where selecting to not show the labels (ie. Genres: or Countries:) was not working as expected in Elementor
• A bug causing a critical error if you were trying to edit an event post using Elementor was resolved
• Fixed a bug related to an ACF change causing the 'sponsor image' and 'sponsor link' fields to not render in the 'Configured by WordPress' section.
• 3D svg path updated so this icon will pull through correctly in 'special attributes', also removed the helper text thanks to client feedback.
• Earliest Event Time field now populates when events are imported from Elevent. This is the first stage of an upcoming new feature.

We're introducing 2 new features and some smaller improvements:

Special Attributes

You can now select special attributes on your showtimes to identify any specific shows that have aspects of interest to the buyer--these may be accessibility, like ASL interpretation, bonus content like a Q&A or talkback, or technical details like 3D or IMAX projection.

When populated, an (i) icon will show next to the ticket button, that, when clicked, will show a modal indicating what special attributes are on the event.

Time Slot Listing Option

For clients who have regularly occurring events occurring in time slots (eg. museum or gallery entry), you now have the option to change how the date-picker will appear on the event page. Instead of showing all dates and times as default (which is visually messy), it will default to the first available date, show a full week in the top bar, and the 'view more' option is now scrollable, so you won't get long dropdown making your UI difficult to use.

To use this option, you can:

• Use the shortcode type attribute 'time-slot': [elevent_showtime_list type="time-slot"]
• In the 'Configured by WordPress' section of your event, check the 'Time Slot Event' box.

• You can comment out the default elevent_showtime_list and uncomment the time-slot version in the single-page.php template.

Other minor fixes:

• On event pages, if there's only one venue or one date, the filter will not be rendered.
• In the Calendar, if you have an event with a 0 mins runtime, the runtime will not be rendered.
• In the Calendar, the display name will be the event name. Before, the showtime name was being truncated based on when the '-' character was appearing, but this was breaking the display for events with dashes in their name.

• We’re making it easier to stage events and showtimes in WordPress before publicly publishing them.
  • Any showtimes that have anything other than Web and Box Office or Private (those that don't show up on goelevent.com) will now set as WordPress status: pending. These showtimes will not be displayed on the calendar/grid/event pages.
  • Elevent Events have a new event status: pending. Any event without any published showtimes will be event status: pending and can be hidden from event grids, lists, carousels, or calendars—similar to how past events work.

• This fixes a bug that was allowing 'Box Office only’ showtimes to be automatically synced and displayed online.
• This fix will also remove any reference to the venue / date of the hidden showtime unless there are other events taking place at the same location.

If your filters are no longer populated after this change, head to Settings > FacetWP and click 'reindex' on your Facets.

Major Changes

We've changed our name!

• Elevent for WordPress is now known as Elevent Event Ticketing

The Advanced Custom Fields plugin from WPEngine is no longer required. Custom fields, field groups, posts, and taxonomies are now bundled into Elevent Event Ticketing

• If you use Advanced Custom Fields and have it installed, you may find the free version is deactivated on your site. This is expected behavior as the Pro-level features in the Elevent Event Ticketing plugin override the free version of ACF. If you still want to access to any custom fields you’ve created, you should still be able to see the ACF menu.
• If you don't need to customize your own fields, you can delete the free ACF plugin, as all the Elevent fields, post_types, etc. are now handled by the Elevent Event Ticketing plugin.
• If you have ACF Pro installed already, it will not be reinstalled by the plugin and you should be able to continue to use it as usual.
• Installation and future updates to the Elevent plugin no longer contain any tasks to upload ACF updates.

Minor Changes

• Significant code refactoring
• Fixes for spacing for Gutenberg and Elementor on Elevent Date Picker
• Styling of list date buttons in default list to include ticket icon, spacing and new hover

• Improved the styling on the Buy Tickets button towards the bottom of the Multi-part event shortcode and block. The link in the button now inherits text color from the button, not the tag background color

• Edited showtime buttons to appear more clickable on event lists and the [elevent_showtime_list] ticketing shortcode and block

• Updated bootstrap fonts to 1.11.3 and adding bi- tag to uses. This protects the view switcher block from losing its icons on mobile views
• Fixed pagination for events to ensure syncing over 50 events per paginated request. Refactored pagination logic into a method

• Fixed a 3rd-party compatibility issue that caused the datepicker look & feel to degrade
• Replacing DOMNodeInserted with MutationObserver

• Added some spans with unique IDs to the calendar legend showtime list and calendar; this makes it easier to target and style or hide individual legend options.

• Amended the [elevent_promo_event_date] shortcode, often used in an Event Grid, to automatically show a date range instead of individual dates when there are showtimes on > 3 different days. This includes handling for on-demand, virtual showtimes that are available over a range of dates and non-contiguous schedules.

• Added support for API pagination of showtimes when > 50 showtimes exist for a single event.
• Added a solution for API pagination of events when > 50 future, ticketable events exist
• Lots of background work done preparing for the next phase of the plugin
• File restructuring within the plugin

We're introducing a small set of usability improvements to help users browse and discover events.

• Venues will now sort in alpha descending order on the Calendar - Day Schedule view.

• Improved the mobile-friendly view of the tricky event list default template.

• Showtimes of the same event in different venues will now display showtime-specific colors on the Event Calendar--if you allow filtering and coloration by venue.
• Added a fix for daylight savings causing the datepicker to show the wrong date on late-night events

• Added support for showtime-specific venue coloration and filtering on the event calendar pages for events shown in more than one venue.
• Fix for daylight savings issue; suppressed web browser's attempts to auto-correct the time zone which was causing the datepicker to show the wrong date
• Venues will now sort in alpha descending order on the Calendar Day Schedule view
• Improved the default display handling of the event list view on smartphone-sized displays