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The developer who created the plugin for adding named attendees to the woo tickets/ECPro plugin hasn’t updated it for the latest release. You say you’re working “on the ability to attach information about a specific attendee to each ticket” – so it must be feasible. And I think it’s pretty fundamental. Are we talking 2013 or 2014…
We created the extension for WooTickets and made it available to others at http://buzzwebmedia.com.au/event-bookings-with-wordpress/ to be a very interim solution for collecting individual attendee details. With the update of the Events Calendar & WooTickets however it no longer works.
I believe I’ve seen requests for this feature as far back as last year. If this feature is not coming any time soon, would you be willing to update the extension I provided to be compatible with your latest updates to carry everyone over until you do add this feature?Thanks,
JPI was just in a meeting with the client – they really like the ECPro calendar, the ease of adding events and tickets but then she asked ‘so where will I see the attendee list after they’ve purchased the tickets?’
The issue is that anyone using this system is doing it for a relatively small audience and needs to collect those names and have them visible in the attendee list. When I discovered the Buzz media solution I thought all my issues were solved – then realised that it’s broken in the latest version.
It really needs fixing or I need another solution.
Hi, Nicholas. This is a great question. 🙂
While getting this feature rolled into the add-on is certainly still on our radar and part of our plan for the future, we don’t have any specific timetable. Currently, we’re waiting until the codebase is 100% stable and bug-free (or as close to it as we can muster) before we even think about starting to further work on features, etc.
J-P, unfortunately, we don’t have any extra bandwidth to help you update your extension. We are available to answer specific questions if anything comes up. You should be able to find most of what you’ll need in our technical documentation, linked in the right sidebar.
I’m sorry I don’t have better news for you. Please let us know if there’s anything we can do in the interim while you’re waiting for a solution. 🙂
Hi Kelly
This isn’t really the answer I was expecting from a forward-thinking organisation. What do you suggest as an interim solution or an alternative that provides this functionality? Are you saying that JP can go ahead and fix the plugin and then you’ll assist where necessary? I don’t think I’m the only disgruntled client of yours and it would be a great asset to the product if this was included.Hi Nicholas. I head up the support team here, and Kelly passed your note along my way. I wanted to follow-up with you to provide you an update here – it sounds like the answer we gave isn’t to your liking, so I figured I’d provide some context.
Ultimately, what’s being requested here is additional functionality – it’s a feature that will take the plugin in a different direction than it’s headed now. Currently this plugin serves one simple purpose: allowing you to tap into WooCommerce to add tickets to your events. It was never meant to be a full-on event management plugin, and while we do see the value in adding attendee specific names and indeed have it on the roadmap, that change is part of a broader overhaul to the plugin. It unfortunately will not occur overnight. We have some more bugs to iron out and stability issues we want to get sorted before we continue work on additional features. But we know this is something a lot of people want and we’d be foolish not to ultimately look on either supporting user solutions like J-Ps, or integrating our own.
If folks need a solution in the interim, they’re unfortunately probably going to want to either hire a developer to build something, or find another plugin that better meets their needs from a functionality perspective. Sorry that I couldn’t offer you a more immediate resolution here but please know your feedback is being heard. If I can answer any other questions or provide any other insights here please let me know. Otherwise thanks for your patience and understanding.
I understand fully what you are saying and of course it’s understandable that you need to tread carefully with updates. But this isn’t something new, it’s been knocking around for a year now, a bit too long in software years. The requested additional functionality is pretty basic and I think when you were scoping this out it would have come up in any user survey.
In the current state, I can’t use this for my current project and often once you lose a customer, they’re gone forever…
Hi, Nicholas. Thank you for your candid response. We really do value your feedback.
First, let me assure you that we would really hate to lose you as a customer and will do everything in our power to keep you happy. Unfortunately, if your schedule is too aggressive for our timetable and development process, you may have no other choice but to find another solution.
If there’s anything else that we can help you with, please don’t hesitate to ask! 🙂
Hi Kelly,
I only did a quick bandaid after I discovered this was not a feature as I had assumed from the description prior to purchasing. I’m not using it now because I think it requires a better solution for multiple attendees.I suggested that you take over the extension as I don’t want to keep supporting something that I made available freely, don’t use myself and may get broken every time you do an update.
As you are familiar with your own updates it would take less than 30 minutes to fix the extension to provide an interim solution for all the purchasers that assumed individual details would be collected for attendees.
Hey J-P. Thanks for the follow-up here. We do indeed still have the notes from our original exchange with you on this in an open ticket. We definitely appreciate the work you’ve done on it so far and we do want to incorporate something that accomplishes what you’ve mentioned and set the groundwork for.
That said, our development cycle is a monthly one. And since we just launched a major overhaul (3.0) of all plugins back at the start of the summer, our monthly releases since then have been focused almost entirely on optimizing the existing codebase and stabilizing bugs/improving our documentation. Once we see how well the current release (shipping in early November) does in the wild we’ll be able to best determine where resources for the next release go. And if things are looking good enough that we can start shifting back to features at that time you should rest assured knowing that this is something we’ll seriously exploring based on how much demand we’ve seen thus far.
Thanks again for your patience/understanding here so far, and do let me know if you have other questions or if I can clarify this at all.
I have to chime in here. I have been using TEC Pro and Wootickets for over a year now, and since the introduction of Wootickets I have been patiently waiting for this feature above and beyond all others. In fact, I have purposely NOT upgraded TEC Pro and Wootickets because I MUST have this functionality to operate, and JP’s extension is the only thing keeping us rolling.
I have already purchased licenses for several of your competitors to test their systems out, and some of them make a decent product. But I really, really, really don’t want to move to another calendar system. I like your setup, and I want to stay with you guys, but the failure of your dev track in recognizing the absolutely critical importance of attendee name collection/check ins is pushing my back up against a wall.
IMO, Wootickets and TEC Pro is a system built for small to medium sized events. In my business, I run anywhere from 1 to 12 small to medium sized events EVERY SINGLE DAY. We max out at about 70 people per event, and average around 10-15, so let me assure you that I have probably used your product more than 99% of your customers. I am sure many of your users only have a few events a year, but as someone who uses your programs ALL THE TIME, all day long, I can attest to the fact that attendee names are NOT a luxury feature for event management, they are absolutely mandatory.
You can NOT expect the customer to bring in their ticket. You can NOT expect your customer to know their order/ticket #. You can NOT expect them to have a cell phone capable of pulling up their order completed email. You can NOT even expect your customer to know who purchased their ticket, as many times they are part of groups with only tangential knowledge of who did what.
The ONLY thing you can (almost) ALWAYS count on a customer to know is their own name.
Furthermore, as a business owner who is hungry for repeat customers, I NEED the name and email of every single person my business touches. If I can’t market to people who have already been exposed to my business, then I am throwing away potential repeat customers. Again, this isn’t an optional requirement, this is vital business logic that must be followed if anyone expects any degree of success. Acquiring customers is expensive, so throwing away any contact info is throwing away your potential to get that person back into your business, which is FAR cheaper than finding someone new. Simply put, the ticket purchaser is not enough, and ignoring the rest of the attendees as a business commodity is financial suicide.
I apologize if I sound harsh in this post, as I truly love your products. The only reason I am posting this is because I really want to continue utilizing them!
I couldn’t wait for this so I’ve moved to Event Espresso. As they said in the their last post, if you need the feature, go elsewhere. I like what MT are doing but I’m not sure who this product is aimed at anymore. Whilst looking for alternatives I saw that another plugin developer has also just launched an event and ticketing solution that does a lot more for around the same price. I couldn’t see if it had attendee collection but Event Esp does so it’s fixed my problem for the time being.
Hey guys – thanks for this. Mike: you make a really great, passionate case for this and I can’t say how much we appreciated it. I shared it with the team and we discussed this a lot today, and the ultimate takeaway should be this: we are going to do this, and it’s a huge priority for us. While we generally don’t comment as to specific functionality and where it is on the roadmap until it’s done and ready for release, I want to be 100% transparent here.
First: I see some references earlier in this thread to discussions about adding this functionality “last year”, and that as a result of how much time has passed, it should really be included by now. The unfortunate reality here though is that when we first had those discussions, we also expected the core/PRO 3.0 plugins to be called 2.1, and we planned on having them out by October 2012. The scope grew, the plugin became something bigger than what we planned, and we ended up not getting it out the door until substantially later than that. The months since have been spent almost exclusively on stabilizing the core plugins + addons, rather than feature enhancements. Our monthly maintenance build for November seems to be the first where we’re feeling confident enough that we’ll be able to shift back to feature stuff in December. But I want to stress that this is not just a matter of WooCommerce Tickets – the whole plugin ecosystem needs to be considered.
To that same end, we’ve had a couple additional ticket plugins – EDD Tickets and WPEC Tickets – in the queue for a while now, and have made a conscious decision to avoid enhancements to the tickets framework (which runs both those and WooCommerce Tickets) until those are both out the door. As both are looking to ship within the next month or so this again lines up with the feature-minded timetable I mentioned above.
One of our main struggles with this plugin is balancing what it was intended as (a simple, lightweight, straightforward ticketing tool) and what people seem to largely use it as (a broader event management system). While we are finding that balance, it is something that’s taken time. But I am 100% serious when I say we all want to do attendee names as you’ve noted – and in our ticket system, it’s literally our only P1 feature for WooCommerce Tickets. While available resources and the development cycle have kept us off it so far this year, we feel your pain and will prioritize this when we can. I realize that’s not as ambitious or specific a timetable as folks might have hoped for and I apologize on that front.
Nicholas: I’m sorry to hear you’ve moved over to another solution, but wish you the best of luck with Event Espresso and am glad to hear you found a feature set that better meets your needs.
Mike, I welcome any further thoughts / concerns you might have – but I suggest we take this offline. If you’d like to continue the discussion please don’t hesitate to shoot me an email directly, rob (@) tri.be. Thanks again.
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