What's new in Elevent

In an effort to streamline the checkout process, we've removed one small confirmation screen when using Elevent widgets. We're always looking for ways to maximize the balance between converting sales online and maximizing the amount of engagement of each visitor.

This change only applies to embedded widgets.

Heretofore (Fancy way of saying "before now"), when someone added anything to their cart, they'd see an explicit confirmation that the item was added to their cart. There's a reason for this:

• We can't always count on everyone putting a good, visible cart widget on their website
• Customers actually don't expect a real shopping cart when they buy tickets and passes. Most ticketing systems make people check out over and over. Customers abandon even the attempt at future purchases after 1-2 completed purchases. The explicit confirmation makes it patently obvious they can add more to their cart and then check out just once.

However, when you start to add on other steps like a donation upsell, add-ons, or requesting info to print on a credential or badge, it can get a bit chatty.

Where you used to see an explicit confirmation that items were added to a cart, like this:

Now customers will land directly on the cart, with an option to dismiss the cart and keep shopping, like this:

This is a change we've been testing and the preliminary data indicates a slight improvement--we'll keep this change at full scale and collect gobs of data to ensure that keeping the change is a net positive for all.

The Staff Shift Report gets used a lot. This is where you can reconcile and audit cash, checks, and other non-card payments by each agent's working shift.

We've added some additional filters to give this report more utility--now you can filter this report by:

• Payment Method
• Sales Channel

Because you can run this report for all staff activity, it's a handy way to reconcile non-card payment activity by your whole organization or one location at a time. It'll also help you pool tips.

Learn more about the Staff Shift report in this deep dive.

Note: Stay tuned for some new, more purpose-built reports & functionality for managaging day-to-day venue operations. We have a lot in the works.

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.

Some locations have multiple auditoriums or other venues behind a single gated point of entry. Having the person/people gatekeeping switching between showtimes to scan can be tedious--especially when you get busy.

Since Elevent can scan credentials that could be used to get into multiple shows, scanning from a chokepoint like this is trickier than with a tickets-only system. But we've got it sorted.

If you've had a chance to get familiar with the new look & feel of Entry, one of the first things you might notice is the button on the top left.

For tablet and other widescreen displays, agents start off scanning all showtimes by default. They can still scan for a single show by pressing it. Mobile/smartphone users will either press the Scan All Showtimes button or choose a single show.

Then let scanning commence (list mode doesn't work here--that'd be one unmanageable list).

Tickets are always to a single showtime, so they scan normally.

Pass and ticket package credentials have some thinking to do. If they present a credential that can only be scanned into a single upcoming showtime, the system is smart enough to punch them into whatever showtime that is.

However, if there are multiple showtimes that the credential-bearer could get in to see, the agent will hear a different sound and choose which one for now.

Scan All Showtimes is supported in Entry on all size devices and in the Elevent At The Door iOS app.

Learn how to bring your chokepoints in check here.

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.

We're always looking for ways to make walk-up transactions speedier and more efficient. Even the act of pressing a print button can add seconds to each sale--and seconds add up.

As you might know, in the Elevent Box Office you can print both tickets and receipts. You can print tickets and receipts on a ticket printer. You can print tickets and receipts on a receipt printer. You can print tickets on a ticket printer and receipts on a receipt printer. You can eat them in a box. You can eat them with a fox.

No matter how you print, now you can enable auto-printing in your box office printer settings.

When enabled, agents won't need to push the print button after an order; tickets and/or receipts will automatically print each and every time.

Learn more about the thrilling world of ticket and receipt printer configuration here.