In this post, I'll show you how to use the WordPress Events Calendar Registration and Tickets plugin to create different types of events for your website. Most importantly, I'll show you how to keep track of all attendees and sell tickets for your events.
No matter what kind of event you’re organizing, you want people to be able to participate in it easily. That means you need to have a way for users to register for your events and confirm their booking through your website. And if it’s a paid event, users should be able to pay for it online without much hassle.
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That might sound like a lot of work to set up: registration forms, displaying events in a calendar, accepting different payment methods, and allowing users to purchase event tickets. It would be a lot of work if you had to start from scratch, but fortunately there are WordPress plugins that already provide all the necessary features.
When it comes to setting up events in WordPress, there are hundreds of extensions and plugins available online. You'll find free options, and also find premium plugins that provide ready-to-use features and extended support. In the case of commercial options, you should also expect quality code, bug fixes, and new enhancements.
In this post, we’re going to explore the WordPress Events Calendar Registration & Tickets plugin which is one of the most popular and all-in-one plugin in the event management category. It allows you to create different types of events, be they seminars, workshops, conferences or any other kind of event. From the front-end, users can register themselves for the event and pay for it if it’s a paid event.
Let’s have a look at a couple of important features this plugin brings:
- online event booking and payment
- single event support
- event list and grid layouts
- event calendar view
- Google map integration
- statistics dashboard
- and many more
In fact, this plugin provides a plethora of useful features all at a reasonable price, allowing you to set up a complete event booking flow on your WordPress website.
What We'll be Building
There are different types of events you could with this plugin. In this post, I’ll demonstrate how one could allow users to register for a seminar event and pay for it online.
In this, let's assume that you’re an expert WordPress developer and you would like to arrange a one day seminar to teach different aspects of WordPress to participants. And thus, you’re planning to open online registration for your seminar with a certain fee.
In the front-end, you’re setting up a calendar so that users can see the available dates of your seminar. Interested users should be able to register for the seminar by filling up the registration form. And finally, they should be able to pay for it to confirm their registration.
Throughout this tutorial, we’ll explore different aspects of this plugin while moving closer to our goal. In the next section, I'll show you how to download and install this plugin.
If you want to try the plugin free of charge, you can visit the WordPress Events Calendar Registration & Tickets live demo.
Download and Installation
In this section, we’ll see how to install and configure the WordPress Events Calendar Registration & Tickets plugin once you’ve purchased and downloaded it from CodeCanyon. For this post, I’ve used WordPress 5.2.3, and the WordPress Events Calendar Registration & Tickets plugin version is 2.4.9. I would recommend that you install it if you want to follow along with this post.
As soon as you purchase this plugin, you’ll be able to download the plugin zip file. This is a WordPress plugin file which you can install from the WordPress admin. So go ahead and follow the standard WordPress plugin installation process.
Important Back-End Configurations
In this section, we’ll go through a couple of important back-end configuration settings that we need to do for this plugin to work properly.
Head over to the WordPress admin side and access the Events+ > General Settings section. Under the Contact tab, fill in all the information and make sure that you fill in the Your Company Name field as shown in the following screenshot.
Under the Payment tab, enable payment methods that you would like to enable during the registration. At the moment, there are four payment methods supported: Authorize.net, PayPal, Stripe and Offline Payment.
During the installation, the WordPress Events Calendar Registration & Tickets plugin creates a couple of important pages in your website. One of them is the Registration page and we need to edit it.
Go ahead to Pages section and edit the page titled with Registration. You just need to add the {EVRREGIS} code in that page as shown in the following screenshot and save that page.
With that done, we’re ready to continue with the global settings. Navigate to the Events+ > Page Config section. You need to make sure that the Main registration page field contains the Registration page that you just edited. Refer to the following screenshot for clarification. Click on the Update Configuration Settings button to save the settings.
This is the most important step in the plugin configuration, so please ask me if you have any doubts. If you don’t configure this properly, the plugin won’t work at all.
Finally, navigate to the Confirmation tab which allows you to enable different email notifications and templates. It’s pretty self-explanatory so we won’t go through that in detail.
Apart from these settings, there are a few other settings that you could configure as per your requirements. However, we’ve covered all the critical settings that are required for this plugin to work. From the section onwards, we’ll start working on the WordPress developer seminar example which we discussed earlier.
How to Create Paid Events
In the previous section, we fine tuned the plugin configuration in the back-end. In this section, we’ll move closer to our goal by creating the event category and event itself.
Create a Category
Access the Events+ > Event Categories menu which takes you to the event category page. Click on the Add New Category link and that should allow you to add a new category. Go ahead and create the Workshop category as shown in the following screenshot.
Click on the Add Category button to save the category settings.
Create an Event
Once you have created the category, it’s time to create a new event! Navigate to the Events+ > Add Event link and that should open the following UI to add a new event.
There are different sections here that allow you to enter information about the event. We’ll go through the important sections since the rest of the stuff is self-explanatory.
Under the Description tab, enter the basic event information as shown in the following screenshot. Make sure that you select the Workshop category in the Event Categories field.
Next, there’s the Event Venue tab which allows you to enter the venue of your event. Enter your event venue details and you’re done. Set the Use Google Maps On Registration Page field to Yes if you want to show the Google map on the event registration page.
Further along is the most important section of all: Event Date/Time. There are two types of events you could add, one-off events and recurring events. In our use case, we are creating a one off event, and thus the settings looks like this.
Finally, there’s the Event Options section which allows you to enable a couple of extra fields that you might like to add into your event registration form. In our use-case, I've enabled the Phone Number field.
Click on the Add Event button and that should save your event and it should take you to the event listing page.
Add Event Fee
If you want to set up a fee for your event, you'll need to configure it for your event first. On the event listing page, click on the Fees/Items link as shown in the following screenshot.
When you click on the Fees / Items link, it takes you to the Event Items / Cost Management page. Click on the Add Cost / Item button to set up your event fee as shown in the following screenshot.
It’s important to note that you must need to select the REG - Registration Attendee in the Type of Item / Cost field, otherwise the registration won’t work properly.
Next, enter the name and description of item. You can also select the maximum number of seats that can be booked during registration.
Let’s make the event paid as well along with setting the event registration price per attendee.
Finally, enter the Start Date and End Date during which period you want to enable event registration.
And with that, we are almost done and we’re ready to display the calendar on the front-end. In the next section, we’ll explore it and demonstrate the front-end registration process.
How to Display an Event Calendar On the Front-End
Event calendars are displayed category-wise, so let’s go to the Events+ > Event Categories page which lists out all the categories along with their shortcodes as shown in the following screenshot.
The [eventsplus_list event_category_id="1"] shortcode is used to display events in a list-view. On the other hand, the [PLUS_CALENDAR:Workshop] shortcode is used to display events in a calendar view. In our case, we’ll use the later, so go ahead and add the [PLUS_CALENDAR:Workshop] shortcode in a page or post and publish it. And it looks like the following:
As you can see, it displays events in the calendar view nicely. Click on any event and you'll be taken to the event detail page as shown in the following screenshot.
Click on the Register button, and it will open the event registration form:
Fill in the registration form and click on the Submit button to initiate the event registration process. On the next step, you’ll be shown registration confirmation along with the payment options that you could use to pay for the event.
In our case, we’ve enabled the PayPal and offline payment methods, and thus you can see two payment methods to choose from. Once users pay for the event, their registration is confirmed. As per the settings, notifications will be sent about the new registration.
So that’s the complete flow of setting up paid events on your WordPress website by using the WordPress Events Calendar Registration & Tickets plugin. This plugin is capable of doing a lot of amazing things and what we’ve discussed is just one of the use-cases you could implement.
Conclusion
Today, we discussed one of the most popular plugins in the event management category in WordPress: the WordPress Events Calendar Registration & Tickets plugin. It’s a commercial plugin available at CodeCanyon at a very reasonable price.
Try it free today with the WordPress Events Calendar Registration & Tickets live demo!
I hope that you’re convinced that the WordPress Events Calendar Registration & Tickets plugin is useful enough to fulfill your requirements. Although it’s a commercial plugin, I believe it’s reasonably priced considering the plethora of features it provides.
If you have any suggestions or comments, feel free to use the feed below and I’ll be happy to answer your queries!
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