First of all a big thank you to all those who took 1.4 for an early spin and tested out the beta-versions. After some thorough testing I’m confident 1.4 is the best and most stable release to date.
A summary of the features added can be found here, but they include the much requested ‘Simple Booking Mode‘ (for when you just want users to RSVP), as well as booking form templates to give you complete flexibility when required. If you have any questions on this, please use the General Questions forum and I’ll either answer you there, or make a tutorial out of it.
As well as various “user-facing” changes (e.g. settings tab for booking forms), there’s been a substantial “under-the-hood” re-factoring of the code, in particular the Booking Form and Gateway APIs (documentation to follow). These changes will make possible future features and add-ons (Discount codes, Stripe payment gateway), and offer greater flexibility for those you need Event Organiser to implement more bespoke features.
As always, if you encounter any bugs, please report them here: https://wp-event-organiser.com/forums/forum/report-a-bug
Looking ahead…
Nothing has been set in stone yet for 1.5, but here are some potential features that are being considered:
Priced Fields
A ‘priced fields’ metabox in the form customiser would allow you to add a field (e.g. select, checkbox, radio) where associated with each option is a price (positive or negative). Selecting an option adds (or removes) an amount from the total checkout amount. This is useful for situations where tickets come with some optional priced extras, or tickets can be collected or sent out for a postage fee.
This feature is still in early stages of development, but I like it because it adds a useful feature, while not adding extra clutter to the plug-in.
UI changes to ticket manager
Currently a jQuery modal is used for editing/creating tickets on the edit event admin screen. Although this works ok, WordPress’ WP3.6 release has made it look a bit dated. I think this will look further out of place when WordPress’ admin eventually gets remodelled (http://wordpress.org/plugins/mp6/). The solution is to drop the jQuery modal in favour of something suitable, potentially something similar to the media modal.
… or it could be mean dropping the modal set-up completely and editing the tickets is done ‘inline’, where you can hide or reveal a ticket’s settings. Modal’s are a bit dated, and often offer poor UI, so this maybe the route taken.
I’ll be posting more about this option, because I would love to get feedback on how you think it could be improved.
Time option for tickets
This would allow you to specify the time not just the date on which the ticket goes on (and off) sale.
I’m linking this to the above for the reason that reworking the user interface is a great chance to look at how greater flexibility on ticket management can be offered. Certainly this feature requires some sort of change to how tickets are edited as the jQuery modal is feeling a bit cramped.
The idea for this is:
- Date/time options similar to the event date options
- An ‘all in one’ date-time option. Which would involve this date(-time)picker
Thoughts and suggestions welcome on this too!
More email tags
I think that says it all – but the associated topic on the forums is here.
This will give you greater flexibility in your emails to attendees or default email responses.
Other features will be considered, and as always we’ll be considering requests given at the Request a Feature forums.