What's new in Elevent

To minimize disruption while you work, we extended the length of time a user could be idle in the Back Office and Entry before needing to log in again.

Beforehand, if a user was logged into Elevent anywhere and idle for more than an hour, they'd need to log in again to keep working. Because of the security around a point of sale, the timeout in the Box Office is still 1 hour, but now you have up to 3 hours when working in the Back Office or Entry.

A note about working in multiple tabs--that's welcomed, of course, but each tab must get factored in to deciding if you are idle for too long. If any Back Office or Entry tab is idle for more than 3 hours, you will get signed out everywhere and need to log in again.

This one's for the gearheads.

For other systems that talk to our API, you can now retrieve everything you'd want to know about concessions and merch. What the products are and who bought what when.

You can supplement your CRM data with who bought what tangible goods alongside their everything-elseness (Like we'll be doing in our Salesforce app). Or you can create a digital product screen behind your points of sale and turn your popcorn counter into a Wendy's. The fries' the limit.

Expand your knowledge how to retrieve concessions and merch from the API here.

• 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

Users of the Elevent At The Door iOS app may have noticed, after a short period of inactivity, the app tends to put itself to sleep. The app was permitting the device's locking period to rule over the app's sleep time.

Now Elevent At The Door will override that short time period and stay active and alive for far longer--no matter what's set on the phone's settings.

The look & feel of Entry on tablets and larger screens was showing some age--so we gave it a total redo.

For the sake of posterity, here's what it used to look like. You'd be greeted with any showtimes coming up in the next few hours on top, and past events below. And you'd choose which showtime you are admitting people to at this point in time.

And after selecting a showtime, you are taken to screen where you can scan, check in people on list mode, and see scan counts.

Not bad. But to add some new capabilities to Entry, we first needed to give it a rethink.

Now all of Entry lives on just one screen--where you can switch back and forth between showtimes at the push of a button.

Since attendees sometimes see this screen, we'll show your logo at the top. Once you select a showtime, scan or punch people in as you did in the past.

Everything has been cleaned up and tweaked a bit to make it easier to scan visually--including scan counts or new icons showing which customers have passes vs. tickets.

We soft-launched the new interface in an opt-in Beta a couple of months ago, so some of you have seen it already. You can still switch back to the legacy screen for now (Press "Back to Legacy" towards the top), but the new Entry interface is now the default.

Learn more about Entry here.

Improvements and new features galore. Well…it's not that big of an update, so semi-galore.

• Updated the default Event List template to sort chronologically out of the box.
• Added some sample code to the Event List template to show how to filter it to show events from specific festival/season/series. Uncomment it to use it.

To take advantage of these 2 changes, re-import the FacetWP Event List Template from the Plugin Installation Guide

• Fixed a bug where taxonomies/categories wouldn't always update with auto-sync
• Added an option to automatically show a date range for events on an event grid when there are showtimes on more than 3 dates--using the new [elevent_promo_event_date] shortcode
• On the main ticketing shortcode, [elevent_showtime_list], in the default tabbed view, if a showtime spans multiple days, instead of showing a start date and time, the tabs will show a date range. This is handy for multi-day events.
• Remove the 2-digit year from the [elevent_showtime_list] tabs in the default view; now only month and day show.
• Fixed a bug that threw warnings on plugin installation (rogue leading space characters in 2 files)
• Added some CSS classes to enable easier and more effective styling and control on the event calendar and legend. Now you can customize the colors for the legend values and the background color they display on the calendar. (e.g., class "key out" for the sold out color)
• Updated the language in the calendar legend to more accurately describe what each state means.

• Fixed it so the Buy Tickets button on a sub-event will still display on child events when they are the only child event associated with a parent event.
• Added the ability to rename the header of the Showtimes List block (the main ticketing block) to the Elementor "Elevent Showtimes" Block
• Added support to import over 50 showtimes for a single event
• Fixed a behavior where updates to the festival/season/series taxonomy appeared to save but did not actually save. Updating the custom fields ACF file is required to receive this fix.

Some recently improved this-n-thats in the whoozitwhatzits:

• Merchandise and Concessions items are now included as line items in order confirmation emails
• Updated the select field when selecting products on custom order field setup
• Added Brand to the data returned in OnTransactionComplete widget event. Now you can communicate which brand items were purchased from to services like Google Analytics and Facebook, or divert users to a custom landing page after purchase.
• The Event by Reporting Date report now displays showtimes with no sales
• Added stricter enforcement to the one membership per user restriction on goelevent.com
• Several significant speed optimizations and tuning, especially on the box office home screen and customer search

Introducing the initial set of Elevent Elementor blocks - drag, drop, & configurable blocks you can include on page and post templates, headers, and footers.

Just search for "Elevent" in the Elementor block panel and see what's available (A lot more show up on those event-specific post templates)

Want to add a whole mini-menu for all Elevent account login and customer account management? Just drag that block into your site header. Done.

Blocks are great--not only are they easier than shortcodes to find and add, they offer more customization on each page or post for custom text or style tweaks. Stay tuned for more like this.

Not an Elementor user? That's okay--we have a matching library of Gutenberg blocks in the works. You'll already see a few have started to trickle in.

Also in this update:

• Some base CSS changes to make styling easier and nicer out of the box
• Event grid shortcode now has an option for having the results be listed separated by commas, or as a date range assuming 4+ dates.
• Changed the way some date labels get marked up so they are more styleable
• Added the elevent_promo_event_date shortcode. When added to a listing, grid, or loop of events (e.g. Event Grid), it will show the comma-separated date(s) when the events take place. It will automatically flex to a date range when there are more than 3 dates for a single event.
• Bug fixes

The Elevent API has been redone, really. The driving force behind this update is to give us more leeway to provide a greater amount of data and detail without impacting what's most important--the speed and efficiency of transactions.

The first thing to know is that your existing integrations are safe. The API is backward compatible--all pre-existing endpoints and responses still function and the URL and addresses are the same. Phew. So there's nothing you have to do.

But there is more you can do, if you are so inclined--including:

• Retrieve custom order field data--custom info you gather from buyers
• Retrieve venues and venue information
• Retrieve row & seat on tickets if you are doing Reserved Seating
• Retrieve the VenueID on Get Showtimes results
• Retrieve customer status on Get Customers results--to see if customers are active or otherwise
• See price and description on all Get Products results
• Get a deeplink to the customer details page in Get Customers results
• Added some bits to donation orders to indicate if they are round-up or automated donations
• Return General Ledger codes on Get Products calls
• Retrieve price and description on Get Products calls
• Added which brand(s) are associated with all the tickets in Get Showtimes calls
• Added ShowtimeStartDateTime, ShowtimeEndDateTime, and ActivationDateTime ISO 8601 DateTime properties to Get Showtimes calls from the External Web API

Revisit the tech specs of the Elevent API here.

Just to keep things spicy, we have not one but 2 apps you can use to gatekeep and check the audience in at the point of entry.

• Entry, the web app that works on all devices (but doesn't work with a smartphone camera)
• Elevent At The Door, the iOS app that works with camera (but doesn't work on Android devices)

Until now, they didn't really get along. Something was taken out of context about who was taking whose job, then Box Office got involved, it was a lot of drama.

Anyways, long story short, they made up. Now you can easily access and download Elevent At The Door on our iOS device from the Entry landing page.