What's new in Elevent

Elevent for Salesforce v2.8 is out. It brings in all of a customer's addresses from Elevent, not just one, and gives you real control over where Elevent data lands in Salesforce: when you send an Elevent field to a field of your choosing, it now replaces the default instead of writing to both. The Field Mappings screen has been rebuilt to make all of that easier to see.

If you're upgrading and you've set up custom field mappings, read Before you upgrade below first.

Multiple Customer Addresses

Elevent customers can have a Billing address, a Mailing address and a Seasonal address. Until now, only one of them made it into Salesforce.

Now all three sync:

• Billing goes where it always has: the contact's (or person account's) Other Address, unless you've mapped it elsewhere.
• Mailing and Seasonal go to new Elevent Mailing and Elevent Seasonal fields. Your standard Salesforce Mailing Address is left alone, because the addresses your team has carefully collected in Salesforce are often the ones you trust most.

Add the new fields to your contact or person account page layouts to see them.


When a customer removes an address in Elevent, its fields are cleared in Salesforce. Existing customers' Mailing and Seasonal addresses fill in the next time that customer changes in Elevent; reprocessing older Elevent Updates won't fill them in.

Custom Field Mappings Now Replace the Default

The Field Mapping tool lets you send an Elevent field to a Salesforce field of your choosing. Before v2.8, Elevent kept updating the default field too, so you couldn't really stop Elevent from writing to it.

Now a custom mapping replaces the default. The default field keeps whatever value it already has, but Elevent stops updating it.

A few fields can't be remapped, because the app relies on them to match customers, create records and calculate totals: a contact's Elevent ID, Email, Last Name and Last Updated in Elevent, for example. These show a lock icon.


A Redesigned Field Mappings Screen

In Salesforce, switch to the Elevent app and open Field Mappings.


Each Elevent field now has one row with a single picker, a note of the default it replaces, search, and filters:

• Remapped: fields you've sent somewhere else. The default shown under each one is no longer updated.
• Needs attention: mappings the app can't apply, such as two Elevent fields sent to the same Salesforce field, or a field that's been deleted. Until you fix one, that Elevent value isn't saved anywhere, so fix these first. When a custom mapping collides with an active default, the default mapping wins. These problems are also recorded in Error Logs.
• Fixed: fields that can't be remapped.


Every change is checked before it's saved, and a change that would cause a problem is blocked with an explanation.

Before You Upgrade

If you use custom field mappings:

1. In Elevent Settings, turn off Enable Processing of Imported Data. Leave imports on so new data waits in line.
2. Upgrade.
3. Open Field Mappings and check Remapped and Needs attention on each object mapping. Update any flows, validation rules, reports or integrations that read a default field that's no longer updated.
4. Turn processing back on.

Upgrades can't be undone, so try it in a sandbox first if you have one. Full steps are in the Admin Guide under Updating the App.

Also in This Release

v2.8 includes the v2.7 changes:

• Payment details on Elevent Orders and their opportunities: payment method, last 4 digits and card expiration date. Full card numbers are never stored.
• SKU on merchandise products.

Bug Fixes:

• Number and Checkbox fields can now be chosen as custom mapping destinations.
• Choosing a different record type in the Field Mapping tool now saves, and custom objects now show their record types.

As we continuously make major quality-of-life improvements to the Back Office, today we introduce one of the biggest and most impactful upgrades--all Search pages throughout the Back Office have been reimagined, redesigned, and powered up with new features and capabilities.

Opt-in to Explore; Opt Out to Return to What's Familiar

When you first reach a search page, you'll be presented with a 7-step walkthrough. Check it out

Return to Classic View at any time; or press the ? button to return to the new version.

Where to Find Search Pages

Search pages are all of the listings of events and items, sprinkled throughout the Back Office. Including:

• Events
• Tickets
• Packages
• Passes
• Memberships
• Extras
• Merchandise
• Concessions
• Donations
• Brands (If you have this module)
• Venues
• Sales Channels

Fewer Clicks and Less Hunting Around

There's a lot in the Elevent menus--we're moving more common actions into the pages where they make sense--like creating new events or items right from the search page.

Instantaneous, seamless search for whatever you're looking for right here. Type a few characters and watch the list dwindle.

Click anywhere in the row to dig into all of the fields and details for one event or item.

Improved pagination lets you flip through longer lists with ease.

Create Your Own Custom Views

Have a set of columns and groupings you like to view all at once? Now with custom views, groupings, and an expanded list of fields you can view en masse, you can create your own saved views of your config.

Name it and include only the data you want to see; it'll be saved for you to use again and again, making it easier to troubleshoot and review what you've set up.

Each search page has some different fields, groups, and switches for the kinds of items or concepts you're working with. For instance, on the Tickets page, you can check a box to show or exclude assigned tickets from packages and passes.

Inline Editing

With increased transparency comes increased power--without visiting each item or event's details page, make quick changes to several items right here from the same screen.

Press the Edit button from your useful view.

Quick-click and update any items that need changing and save all of your changes at once.

What's Next

This update contains a lot of usefulness and utility. We have more planned and welcome your feedback as we reimagine the Back Office and how we can get you some of those hours back when you need them the most.

Hi, I'm a test.

Yeehaw!

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.

Elevent for Salesforce v2.5 is out. The headline feature is a much-needed feature that adds some additional settings you can set to have the Elevent app self-manage deletion and cleanup of older files. This is a huge piece towards making sure the Elevent for Salesforce app doesn't use more Salesforce storage space than it needs to.

Elevent Update Auto-Purging

When Elevent for Salesforce syncs data in from Elevent, it uses a 2-step process to make sure your data stays protected and up-to-date.

1. First, all the new data--customers (contacts), items purchased (opportunities), orders, etc. is imported into an object called Elevent Updates. This in in-progress data--nothing you'll see yet in the data you use.
2. Next, those Elevent Updates are processed. This is where the Elevent for Salesforce app checks to see if contacts and other data already exist, checks to make sure the new data is indeed newer, etc.

The history of these Elevent Updates is really useful when troubleshooting anything that doesn't look as expected. They don't get deleted after processing for that reason.

As the weeks and months pile up, those Elevent Updates can start to take up a lot of room in your very constrained Salesforce org. Auto-purging to the rescue.

In Salesforce, switch to the Elevent app.

In the Elevent Settings panel, you'll see the new Log Cleanup section.

Enable it (Highly recommended). The default retention period is 30 days, but you can change it. Press the button and tweak it to your liking.

Note this only auto-purges those in-progress records like Elevent Updates. This will not touch the customer and opportunity data you actually rely on. Also, it will only delete Elevent Updates that are Successful or Ignored--if something might have had an issue, those will remain until manually deleted.

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed a bug causing overuse of imported data when updating the LastUpdatedDateTime stamp. This was the main bug causing storage use to grow over time.
• Fixed a scheduled job status display bug: Job wouldn’t show as scheduled in the settings component even when it is.

There is a new customer report in the report center: Customer Demographics.

This straightforward report makes it easy to grab a list of customers and their addresses/locations in a range of purchase dates. You'll see each person and their recent purchase, which you can export or push to Mailchimp right from here.

You can also filter to a specific postal code or city right on screen to explore hot spots in your existing audience.

Selling merch through the Elevent point-of-sale is fast and easy--just scan the QR code or barcode on the merch, and much like a supermarket, items go into the cart.

What if your incoming merch doesn't come with SKU labels already on them? Now, you can use Elevent to generate and print sticky labels that'll scan during sale.

Generating SKUs

A SKU is that code that uniquely identifies each product, whether you have 1 or 1000 of them. If you've ever shopped for a replacement sink part or an obscurely-sized air filter, you've probably searched for the SKU online to find the exact thing you needed.

To generate them in Elevent, go to and choose the merch you want to work with.

Here we have books with a couple of variants. Each variant has its own price, SKU, and more. One of our books doesn't have a SKU, so you can press the Generate button to have Elevent create one.

Then press to save it.

Once you have a SKU, you can press the yellow to print a label or (https://content.elevent.app/support-images/merch/btn-merch-print-all.png) to print a label for each variant.

These labels aren't fancy--just a barcode and visible SKU for each. These print out on the same Dymo label printers that can be used to print credentials. If you need to print it multiple times, in the print dialog, just input the number of copies you want as you do when printing anything.

You can also print labels for all variants from the Merchandise Manager using the same little print button.

Learn more about merch and merch variants here.

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.

Tickets can no longer walk around the place, acting superior to other products. Like tickets, membership cards and scannable passes can also be added to a user's Apple or Google wallet--in lieu of any printing or email searching.

This opens up a host of new possibilities, in addition to the obvious customer service and convenience benefits.

For instance, it's now possible or even easier to:

• Scan-to-find members from their phone at the box office or any point of sale
• Monetize sponsor visibility or cross-sell from walleted items
• Show symbols or insignias confirming reciprocity access--for instance, add the official NARM badge to certain memberships so your members have reciprocal access to participating museums without them carrying a physical card around
• Cut costs on certain expensive printed/produced credentials

To take advantage of this feature, you need to have enrolled in our mobile wallet add-on. Chat with us through the Back Office if you're interested in turning this capability on.

To extend our redesign of tax-deductible donation receipts, you can further personalize them now with a custom, personalized image. What better way to imbue your thanks with authenticity, professionalism, and strengthen your emotional connection to those who give.

Canadian charities: a signature may be required for a CRA-compliant receipt, so pay special consideration to this option.

To add your personalized image, head to then PDF Settings.

On the bottom of that page, you'll see the Donation Receipt section. Upload or drag in an image to display on any donation receipts your donors receive through Elevent.

Now, all future donation receipts will include this touch of class from you.

Check out how here.