What's new in Elevent

Introducing the hotly anticipated new Calendar views into the plugin.

These are slick new options to display your calendar of events in monthly, weekly, and day schedule densities to complement your other views. It's great for runs of shows, off-season light programming, regular weekly programming, festivals--it's hard to come up with a scenario where you won't want them available.

Events are color-coded and filterable in-calendar by a category you choose. The background color will communicate ticket availability according to the legend underneath. And it's super fast.

Users can flip between a whole month of events…

…one week at a time…

…or one day at a time, seeing in time what's playing at each venue--that's the first image there at the top.

It's also, if I do say so myself, the best darn designed calendar you're gonna find out there, on full-sized screens or on mobile.

Also in this release:

• Added icons and mobile responsiveness to the new event view navigation shortcode (e.g., the "pill")
• Fixed a bug that could result in the current day disappearing from the [elevent_dates] shortcode before midnight local time
• Cleaned up some styles, freeing up the ability to customize the look & feel more without running into !important CSS overrides.
• Fixed a bug that allowed the datepicker to bust out of its container when there were a lot of dates

• Created new shortcode for View/Schedule/Calendar "Pill" navigation. Add [elevent_event_nav paths="" names="" icons=""] to any regular WordPress page to create a custom navigation that displays the names, and links to each view of your events you wish to offer. As a shortcode, offers the ability to have multiple, different view switcher navs on different parts of your site.

• Replaced the Sponsor Images gallery with a custom shortcode: [elevent_sponsors]. The new shortcode enables assigning custom links to each sponsor's own website, so when the user clicks a sponsor's image, they are directed to that sponsor's landing page.

• Added ability to choose the taxonomy the new event calendar will be color-coded and filtered by. This is set as the "Calendar Taxonomy" on the Elevent settings page in WordPress.
• Hid Virtual events on calendar views--too much clutter
• Created mobile-friend view variations for monthly and weekly calendar views. Views will be responsive automatically, no changes needed

Important: To take advantage of the changes to the sponsor image gallery, this update requires updates to Custom Fields and changes to any custom single-event-page templates the site currently uses. Back up your site before completing this update.

1. To update Custom Fields, re-import Custom Fields into ACF from the updated file found in the Docs. If you have made any customizations to Custom Fields on Elevent Events or Elevent Showtimes, this re-import will wipe out those customizations. You have the option to re-apply your customizations or contact us via support--we'll tell you which manual changes to make to custom fields.
2. To update single-event custom templates, add the [elevent_sponsors] shortcode to your Elementor or WordPress template(s) in your child theme so it will display.

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.

One of the main reasons for introducing a new Box Office was to create a connection to hardware that was simpler to set up, faster, more reliable, and compatible with more devices. Direct Connected hardware to the rescue.

With Direct Connected Hardware:

• Setup is easier and requires no network knowledge
• Communication isn't affected by network issues
• USB, Bluetooth, or Network connected devices are all possible
• Devices perform faster
• Box Office is compatible with a wider array of hardware, including secure cash drawers, inexpensive receipt printers, scales for pay-by-weight, and more.
• You can still use the same Box Office app as a portable drop-in box office or a fixed-position, high-volume point of sale.
• Easier for sales agents to use

Connecting to hardware is a pretty boring topic; if there's one aspect of it that's rather special to Elevent it's that the Box Office remains a highly portable web app you can use anytime, anywhere on any operating system or modern browser. But now you can connect it to printers without involving your local network--box office now sees all your local printers.

The new Box Office and direct connection also improve the box office/concessions agent's use of the system. The point-of-sale will now do a better job remembering which devices that agent uses. It also heralds the ability to use distinct receipt printers, so now you have the choice to print both tickets and receipts on a ticket printer, on a receipt printer, or print tickets on a ticket printer and receipts on the receipt printer.

Directly-connected devices go beyond the Box Office and are also supported in Elevent's bulk printing tools--this includes bulk-printing tickets, the ticket layout editor, and the Custom Ticket Printing tool.

To direct connect devices, you'll need to:

• Install a local hardware tool we provide
• Install the device to your point-of-sale machine in the same way you'd install a printer at home--including local device drivers for most devices (so this method only works on PCs or Macs--tablets or smartphones don't have drivers)
• Choose the devices to use when you first log into the box office

Network-connected printers and other devices are still supported, so if you have your heart set on selling in one place and printing in another, you can still do that. Setting up network printers is a bit different in the new Box Office, so review the docs and plan on making the transition if you haven't already.

You can follow along step by step how to connect and configure printers in the new box office here.

You may have spied a new setting on tickets--ticket types.

There are only two options right now, but this is a feature we'll continue to expand upon over time.

We needed an easier way to allow you to designate certain tickets, like rush or standby tickets, as available only under certain conditions--ways that were independent from allocations, member exclusivity, ticket packages, or sales channels.

Ticket types really open up the doors to have a kind of ticket that's a whole lot simpler--one that doesn't care about inventory control or allocations. Tickets you can just make available with a simple setup and minimal restrictions.

Of the two types available today, an admissions ticket is a regular, fully-featured ticket you've been selling on Elevent all along. The new Box Office ticket is a ticket that's globally only available for sale via the Box Office.

If you are currently using multiple sections, private allocations, or memberships as workarounds to curate how tickets display or restrict to the box office, try out Box Office ticket types instead.

In the future, we'll expand the ticket types available to introduce some more 'reservation' or low-commitment ticketing options.

In what amounts to just about the last pre-existing feature that needed to be recreated in the new Box Office, sales agents can now easily use customer's gift card to pay for part or all of their purchase.

When agents get to checkout with a known customer in the box office, the agent will see straight away if the customer has a gift card, how much is left on it, and be prompted to apply some or all of the gift card balance to the sale.

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.

Elevent for WordPress now has a slick new ability to combine sub-events into shorts blocks, line-ups, or in-event schedules. Introducing multi-part events in the Elevent for WordPress plugin.

On each Elevent Event in WordPress, you will see a new field--Multi-Part Event.

By adding some sub-events to a multi-part event, you create a relationship between a ticketable event that contains several sub-events, and each individual sub-event, no matter what it is or how you display it. This allows each sub-event, whether it's a short film, short performance, piece, conference session, performer, or act to have its own findable landing page. That's more surface area for each ticketable event--more ways for customers to gain interest.

Multi-part events come with a handy new WordPress shortcode you'll want to add to your single event page templates: multi_part_event

On the event page for the multi-part event, in addition to selling tickets, it'll automatically build a little breakdown showing off what's in store.

Meanwhile, on the landing page for each individual sub-event, they'll see what it's presented alongside and be directed to buy tickets to the whole program.

You'll need the Elevent for WordPress plugin to take advantage of this feature.

We've introduced a new Event List view for the WordPress plugin, using the new Elevent ticket button widgets.

The List View is ideal for schedules with extremely dense schedules, particularly for a single event with many showtimes in a day, week, or month. You'll lead with the List View when date/time and location are the driving factors in a customer's shopping experience (as opposed to choosing what event(s) they want to attend). This is particularly effective for cinema or live performances doing a run of a show.

Each showtime button offers users the ability to add tickets to their cart right then and there.

Or, if they want to explore the event in more depth, they can click More Details and become ensconced in all that there is about that event.

The List View uses the new ticket button widgets, so it's easy for users to pick out tickets from a schedule or list of showtimes without going anywhere else.

For Elevent for WordPress users, there are now two options for how to display ticketing on the landing page for an event--inline and the new list mode.

The original version only had this single option--inline--ideal for a limited number of showtimes, especially if the run is less than a week and you don't exceed 3 showtimes per day.

The List variation shows a denser listing of showtimes, grouped by type of showtime and then by venue, shown in chronological order.

Filtering (e.g, by venue) is still possible here on the event landing page. There's also a legend explaining what the colors on each button mean, to highlight sold out, almost sold out, and other special showtime statuses.

As with all Wordpress shortcodes, these can be used on any page builder, any theme, or any WordPress hosting environment--you just need the Elevent for WordPress plugin.

You'll find this documented on the Elevent plugin settings page in WordPress.