What's new in Elevent

Creating films can be tedious work--there are a lot of bits of information and, in the film exhibition world, you have more rotation in your programming than live events.

We've got you covered.

Now you can create films with rich content in a matter of seconds; when you create an event, you can skip the typing and import info from TMDB, and online film database.

Glance to the right side when you create a new event. Just enter the name of a film, and perhaps a release date to limit the matches.

Select your film and your event is all set. You can customize any and all info and the images after the TMDB import.

To learn more, here's the haps.

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.

If you are embedding widgets into your website--little snippets of Elevent that nestle in quite nicely to your own website--you might be familiar with the Widget Generator. This handy tool lets you choose whatever it is you want to paste into your website and copy it easily.

Handy!

To make it even easier, you'll see a new button called Preview.

Pressing Preview will open up a little window that will show you whatever widget you generated in action--neutrally-styled, but otherwise exactly what you'll see on your own site.

You can even interact with it, add items to your cart, and see any special access or member benefits you have on your own account.

Previews will help you learn about widget options and white-label Elevent into your own website. Also, keep this tool handy if you need to research whether an issue is something to do with your own website or your Elevent configuration.

We have extended the ability for Airtable to update existing event data in Elevent--not just be a source of one-time imported info. Now you can continue to change, update, and manage your events and event data in Airtable without creating duplicate events in Elevent.

As long as the Event Names in Airtable match Elevent, data from Airtable will update the event data in Elevent. Note that this only applies to events, not showtimes on the schedule. Those are still only imported once.

This is an opportunity to rethink what is the most efficient way for you to manage your event data--whether to consider Elevent or Airtable the ultimate source of truth. You'll want to make a firm choice so you don't run the risk of overwriting changes made in Elevent.

Learn more here.

Elevent supports guest checkout, both online and through the box office. However, when system integrators request from the API all recent activity under customers, these anonymously-purchases items aren't included in the response.

We've added a Get All Anonymous Orders call to the API to round out the full picture of tickts and donations sold, to known customers and no one in particular.

This anonymous data is already retrieved by the Elevent for Salesforce app, to help complete your progress reporting against your campaigns and goals.

Small improvement to the Get Showtimes calls from the Elevent API (For instance https://api.goelevent.com/Showtime/All. Showtimes will now list in chronological order in the response.

With extended data about events comes a need to import more of that data easily--enter our Airtable integration.

If you've imported events or showtimes from Airtable in the past, be sure to check in the support team on chat to get the new Airtable template--it contains some handy improvements and can import just about any bit of information that Elevent can hold about events and showtimes.

This really comes in handy if you are using the Elevent for WordPress plugin or are integrated to the Elevent Extended Web API.

Also helpful--now you can categorize event types on whatever you call them, not their out-of-the-box names.

In addition to importing In-person, live streams, and virtual/on-demand showtimes, the new template also includes a Sub-events tab, useful for importing parts of events, like shorts, performers, sessions, works, or acts that comprised a multi-part event.

Learn more about Importing Events and Importing Showtimes from Airtable.

For Developers Only

To help system integrators assess whether to update the data in their own systems, we've added a LastModified date and timestamp to our API calls.

For instance, in the Customer/All endpoint, the API will return customers who had any kind of activity over the time period requested. That might include a purchase, refund, or update of their customer info. Along with their current set of info and items, the API will provide the LastModified timestamp:

If the timestamp isn't more recent than the last update in whatever external data the integrator is using, this update can be ignored.

Learn more about the Elevent API here

For Developers

Building your own web schedule, attendee app, or ticketing integration? If so, using our new External Web API and a slew of additional data fields on events can completely automate the process.

The External Web API needs to be enabled by Elevent, so if this is something you wish to explore, let us know.

When enabled, on events you will see several additional fields on events that are only exposed through the External Web API

Some of these, like Genre or Section, are categories that can receive a comma-separated list of values.

All event and showtime data is easily retrievable for other systems to use from the External Web API. Here's where you can learn all the details.