What's new in Elevent

• 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.

To further economize the agent's screen display in the Beta Box Office, if there is only one allocation in a show, the "Show All Allocations" toggle will be ghosted and unclickable. Since it wouldn't do anything anyways.

At the Premiere and Enterprise pricing tiers, Elevent can step up our preparation, support, and monitoring efforts to make sure your most critical on-sale windows and special events go off without a hitch.

We realize not every Premiere and Enterprise client knows they have this option; and conversely, relying on you, our fearless, overworked event presenters to mention this in chat or a meeting with us wasn't really happening as often as we'd like.

Now, any time you want to give us the heads up, just go to the Knowledgebase, find the "Request Hypercare Support…" article, and fill out the form. This'll trigger us to prep for the big day(s) and keep an eye on things.

What is Hypercare, anyways?

Looking ahead to Hypercare events, we get proactive. If we think your event might need a boost in either tech and/or human resources, we'll apportion what seems reasonable. We're in this together, don't forget--the better you do, the better we do.

The entire support team familiarizes themselves with your upcoming event in advance and remains vigilant during the hypercare window to respond speedily to any issues that arise.

• Premiere clients: Up to 16 hours of Hypercare per year
• Enterprise clients: Up to 40 hours of Hypercare per year

Subtle but important, we have been collecting data on returning users who might not realize they are indeed returning users. We saw a significant enough % of returning users who were getting a little turned around if they didn't realize they'd been here before--even when they see "Welcome Back" after entering their email.

For security reasons (e.g. brute force attacks), every system must exert caution about how much information they share. We have adopted compliant language when a user tries an incorrect password to guide them to reset their password if they are trying to login after forgetting they exist. We are already seeing the beneficial affects of this change.

It's a modest change--users can now add their birthday to their account as they edit their own information on their profile.

We have more plans in store to drive up collection of birthdays for users who wish to share them so you can reward them on their birthday. While it's now possible for users to self-report their birthday, don't expect to collect a ton of them simply from this change. But we expect you can sense where we're going with this.

In the new Beta Box Office (which will be exiting Beta soon), we hid the extraneous "Print E-Tickets" button when the order was processed as either the Electronic or Print-at-home delivery method.

For those orders in an end user's order history, you will still see the Print E-tickets button when you pull up an order from the past.

After seeing some users get themselves into hot water--by customizing each Elevent Event in WordPress independent of customizing the whole event template--it was possible to temporarily create a situation where you might choose to stop keeping Elevent and your WordPress website synced up. That semi-defeats the purpose of having it fully integrated.

To guard against this, we decoupled an Event's description from the standard post content area of Elevent Events. In this way, you will be freed up to add/customize whatever text, block, or media content you want on each Elevent Event's post content area and keep syncing to your heart's content.

Changes in v0.4.6:

• Introduced a new, separate Description field. The Description from Elevent will now update the Description field instead of the default post content for Elevent Events. This makes it easy to highly customize the Elevent Event post content without it being overwritten on re-sync.
• Removed some unintentional debug info displaying on the new calendar views.
• Added custom color selection to taxonomies for color-coding events on the new calendar views.

For the web techies:

Important: For event descriptions to display the way you want, 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 (You shouldn't), 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 Description field/shortcode to your Elementor or WordPress template(s) in your child theme so it will display.

Please note that after updating, Description will no longer update Elevent Event post content. Future syncs will not show a description unless you take steps #1 and #2 above.

If, after update, you see a Description twice on event landing pages, delete the description in the Elevent Event post content. Future events will not have a description in 2 places.

In an effort to simplify discount management a little bit, for member discounts, we've hidden any archived or inactive memberships from the dropdown. You'll only see active memberships now.

Note that you'll need to temporarily reactivate any memberships you plan to use in the future if you want to set up discounts for those members.

Learn more about discounting for members here.

Here's a fun ticketing wonk phrase to add to your arsenal: "Late-night disambiguation". Late-night disambiguation is the art of making it clear to end-users exactly what day you're talking about.

Whether you have your own custom website integration (through the External Web API) or use the Elevent for WordPress plugin, instead of displaying 12:00 AM on the following day (technically correct but who has time to think about what that means), we'll display any midnight times as 11:59 PM--the last minute of that day.

While less technically correct, it's worth it to be a minute off to communicate clearly to end-users.

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.