What's new in Elevent

We've added visual queues to the Showtime Details page to make it clear which tickets are passes and ticket packages.

It's a small but helpful tweak to add clarity when things get complex.

How do you get do the Showtime Details page? Why, the event calendar of course!

Before, when you clean up your workspace or start a new season and archive tickets, the data associated with those tickets wouldn't automatically keep showing up in some reports. We're bringing some of that back.

Retroactively, the sales and check-in activity from those archived tickets will remain present in all Sales and Redemption reports automatically.

By the way, if you aren't saving your favorite reports for easy access, you should consider it.

Member-restricted discounts are one of the most used and appreciated features--they are an easy and robust way to give certain members certain pricing benefits.

So you know what I'm talking about, this is when you create a discount--some $ or % off the price of a ticket, pass, whatever else--that only members can get. You just choose which tiers of members get the discount or free things and off you go.

Most of the time, you're also adding another restriction to these auto-applying discounts--and those restrictions might be intended to last the life of that specific membership. For instance, you might give each member 10 tickets at 50% off for the whole year of their membership--but no more than that.

Now, without doing anything manually, when that member renews or upgrades, they'll get a new lease on life. In our example above, they'll get a reset on the 10 discounted tickets over the life of their new membership.

There's nothing you need to do to take advantage--this is how it works from now on.

Learn more about member discounts here.

Before, we would typically set a date with you and run a year-end process with you to make it easy and convenient to set up your 2nd, 3rd, and Xth year season, festival, or series. While you could run this "Close Festival" process yourself, rather than explain it to people, it's just something we would do.

There are some significant benefits to having a kind of reset button, especially if your events have a complex setup. It is, more or less, a magic button that allows you to tweak some pricing and language, schedule new events, and be on your way for the next year. No one remembers every little rule or association they set a year ago. I can't even remember what I had for lunch.

Archiving the prior event cycle does more than just clean up your workspace--it resets any left over customer history that might affect any rules, restrictions, maximums, or usage that would cause issues in future years.

We gave the entire concept of what it means to end an event cycle and reworked this entire process. Enter the Archive tools.

More self-service than before, you can now archive any of your products, events, and showtimes en masse from the Back Office. Just visit the submenu of any of those things.

You can filter the list down by brand, name, or in the case of events, a date range.

You have some flexibility here--you can discontinue items easily, or just reset them and plan to use them in the future.

Get re-started here.

If you are selling reserved seating tickets where the customer is issued a row and seat assignment, we're making it easier for ushers to guide users to their seats upon arrival.

Now, in the Entry and Elevent At The Door apps, whomever checks the attendees in will see their row & seat assignments on the app. This saves precious seconds and scrying paper tickets in the dark to know where to direct people.

You'll see row & seat assignments both pre-check-in…

And after a successful scan.

It'll display well on both smartphone and larger displays. There's nothing new you need to configure for this to start happening.

Introducing the ability to enable the plugin to sync new and updated events from Elevent automatically. If you enable auto-sync, you won't need to log into WordPress at all to have events update themselves on your website.

But first: We messed up!

You may notice some error messages when trying to update the Elevent for WordPress plugin from the WordPress plugins screen. We accidentally let a security token expire--we're sorry about that.

Just this once, to update the Elevent for WordPress plugin, please do the following:

1. Delete the prior version of the Elevent plugin
2. Upload and activate version 0.6 from the .zip file here. As always, back up your site before doing so, but this was tested extensively and shouldn't be a problem.

Thanks!

• Auto-sync is ready to use. By Enabling Auto-sync on the Elevent Settings page, events and showtimes will sync up from Elevent hourly without user intervention

• Removed the dependency on the CPT UI 3rd party plugin. After this update, you can deactivate and delete CPT UI unless you are using it for other purposes
• Greatly simplified the installation and plugin updating process--no more importing for elevent events, taxonomies, or fields.
• When a user applies the filter on the calendar view, they will no longer be bumped up to the top of the page.
• Made the default colors for showtime status on the calendar view a little easier to see without negatively affecting visual contrast.
• Stopped a chatty message from writing to the PHP error logs frequently.
• Shortened and renamed the key for the festival/season/series taxonomy. We're starting to migrate that category to align with brands in Elevent proper.

The newest version features a wide-sweeping cleanup of CSS styling throughout the plugin, improved SEO, and a fix for multi-part events that have only a single sub-event.

• New Feature (Beta): Enable Autosync. When enabled, will automatically sync up the website with new and updated Elevent Events and Showtimes from Elevent every hour. Please do not enable, yet, on production sites.
• Significant styling improvements to the base styles of the plugin to improve the look & feel of Elevent widgets out of the box
• Made half a dozen enhancements to events for SEO (search engine optimization) and rich search engine results listings for ticketable events.
• Fixed a bug where local, non-Elevent code was allowed to re-adjust for time zones, causing confusion over which day of the week displays and when an event is considered a past event.
• Added a setting to multi-part events to identify which event is the parent event, where tickets are sold. This setting is required when there is a multi-part event that only consists of a single sub-event.

• Truncated the year value on the display of dates when added to event grids and lists
• Truncated the year value on the display of dates on the date tabs of the [elevent-showtime-list] shortcode

We've brought back a feature we briefly lost when we rewrote the new credential system.

In the Back Office, when you pull up a Customer Details page (usually from Customer Search), you can print a single person's badge or label.

If the credential has ever been printed before, when you return to this screen, the button will say Reprint instead.

When you reprint a credential, any barcode or ID from the original print will be canceled--it will no longer work--and a new one will be created for the reprint.

Lastly, to facilitate easier on-demand printing by an agent, we also brought back credential detail in the Box Office--when you pull up a customer.

A green checkmark will let you know if the customer has provided enough info for the credential to print. Pressing the Edit link will take you directly to where you print that credential on that Customer's Details screen in the Back Office.

Note that agents who are able to print credentials would need sufficient permissions to get to the Back Office for badge or label printing.

Learn more about printing credentials here.

In WordPress v0.5.11, we introduce a new plugin setting to help demystify when and how templates are applied to single event landing pages.

When using a page builder like Elementor, there tends to be a bit of a tug of war between WordPress itself and the templates applied by the page builder. For Elevent Events, we let you explicitly check off whether WordPress templates or a page builder's templates should rule the day.

If this checkbox is checked, the default WordPress templates that come with the plugin will take priority. You can copy, modify, and paste your own custom versions into your theme.

While checked, page builder templates (e.g. Elementor) will take precedence.

For your own integrated website to detect new Elevent events and showtimes, events need to meet certain conditions--conditions to consider an event a "ticketable" event, and thus, ready to feature on a website.

Not only would an event have to have future showtimes with tickets, but at least one of those tickets would have to be scheduled to go on sale.

We realized it was inconvenient to have to schedule ticket on-sale times just to alert your website, "Hey, there are some new events here."

Now, an event needs to pass only the these checks to show up on an integrated website:

• An event needs to exist
• It needs to have at least one showtime in the future
• That showtime needs to have at least one ticket in it
• All of the tickets cannot be off-sale (completed) -- i.e., all tickets were on sale but aren't any longer

This change impacts any website that uses the Elevent for WordPress plugin or integrates to Elevent's External Web API.

There shouldn't be any change one needs to make to any bespoke website integration or WordPress plugin user. The info that is provided is the exact same--this change just accelerates when websites will see and know about future events and showtimes.

Learn more about the External Web API here.