Request for a Comparison of plugins

[sj]

Hello,

I just read about the plugin on WordPress SE and I am amazed looking at the plugin.

As there are popular and feature rich plugins exists already, I want to suggest a comparison page on the website showing how Event Organizer is different from GigPress and Event-Manager plugins. That would be useful for every one to compare and shift immediately.

I hope you consider my request.

Thanks!

[Stephen Harris]

Admittedly I’ve not looked at GigPress at all – and have only briefly used Event manager. (In fact the latter was inspiration for this plug-in). I’ll maybe write up a proper review this week but just off the top of my head:

Event Organiser admittedly does not compare favorably with Event manager in its breadth of features –

• EM offers BuddyPress integration,
• EM offers advanced MS support (1.8 EO will support network activation),
• EM offers limited booking handling (with full features in the paid version, whereas EO offers booking handling exclusively as part of its Pro-addon.
• EM supports front-end event submissions (I’ve written on how you can implement this yourself and others have used Gravity Forms. I plan to create an add-on to handle this)

On the flip side Event Organiser supports advanced recurrence rules and arbitrary dates. Last I checked EO is the only event management plug-in with an admin calendar. I think this is important – and in fact I plan on adding features to make it more usable.

However, I feel both the way EO implements its features and its user interface is better (but these things are largely subjective 🙂 ):

• Less bloat – much of the features offered by EM that aren’t in EO, I think wouldn’t be used by 90% of users. For most of them the features can be custom coded (EO is well documented & I’m working on extend-ability this year). My prefered model is a ‘core’ plug-in that does the essentials, and then additional plug-ins (made by me or others) can add in features that are more bespoke.

  • Better architecture – I won’t get into this, but I feel EO’s architectureis better. E.g. venues are taxonomy terms in EO, but post types in EM. The latter does provide additional ‘bonuses’ but I think its the wrong way to do it (and probably does not perform as well)

• User Interface – subjective, but I tried EM a while a go, and I didn’t like it. Partly this is because I felt bombarded by the all features I didn’t need. I’ve tried to keep EO clean and simple to use.

• Code quality – I’m not criticizing the code quality in EM, but some of the features they implement requires some hair-raising code. Generally its fine, and even the ‘hair-raising code’ must work (it’s a very popular plug-in) – but its not something I would include in EO. (As an example, their multi-site features). To be clear ‘code quality’ refers more to how well it sits with WordPress. EO does this better, but is consequently more ‘constrained’ (as such it doesn’t support sharing events across network sites).

In the coming yearI’m hoping to take part in / encourage development of additional add-ons (free & paid) for EO, which focus on ‘use case’ – e.g. add-ons for Gigs, for speaker series (with slides), front-end event posting etc. I feel this model works well (Easy Digital Downloads & Graviry Forms are excelling examples of this model).

Those are my thoughts anyhow, I’ve tried to be impartial in scrutinizing EO – but really which of the event management plug-ins is best depends on the use case and your personal preferences.

[nfo]

Yes, looking forward to 1.8 multisite and will purchase additional add-ons such as buddypress integration, front end and anonymous submission. Let me know when this is available. Thank you.

[Author]

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