Using tables for ticket layout – divs instead?

[Michael Polom]

I see you’re using tables to build the ticket purchase layout – would it not be better to accomplish this through divs?

As an aside, it’d also be nice to see the ability to use other payment gateways, as well as a shopping cart. Of course I understand these are longer term goals!

[Stephen Harris]

Hi Michael,

Apologies for the delay in getting back to you.

would it not be better to accomplish this through divs?

I don’t really see the benefits of divs over a table layout. Unless you’ve got a convincing argument for them, I think tables provide the most ‘natural’ way of presenting the tickets. It is possible (via the available filters) to change this – but currently the javascript was built to expect a table layout. This could (and will) be refactored to make it as ‘layout agnostic’ as possible (probably ~1.3). The aim of this would be to separate the logic from the DOM and via underscore.js-esque templating allow greater control for developers over the mark-up of the form.

it’d also be nice to see the ability to use other payment gateways, as well as a shopping cart

Regarding payment gateways – I’ve recently released a Google checkout add-on – but I’d love to see over gateways made available. I have also written a series on adding your own payment gateway – with the view that other developers can build add-ons for other gateways.

With respect to a shopping cart – this is a feature I’d like to have, but it has to be paired off with the booking filters on the booking admin page. If a booking can contain multiple tickets for different events (or different dates for an event), then filtering by event (or date) no longer makes any sense.

[Michael Polom]

Interesting stuff – I appreciate what you’re saying about tables. I guess I just prefer using divs, but I can see how they could be more suited to this.

I will also spend some time having a look at how to add my own payment gateway!

And I do see what you mean about the shopping cart being quite a bit of work. However, to me it seems like something that would really add something to the plugin, for example I have used it for a couple of festival websites – one with ticketing and one without – and both clients have asked about the possibility of a shopping cart function to allow people to purchase tickets to multiple events. It’s also functionality that seems to be pretty hard to come across! One plugin i’ve seen is WordPress Simple Paypal Shopping Cart plugin (http://s.coop/1mgyy ) but creating a button for every ticket would be a pain!

Please don’t take this as unappreciative though, I absolutely love your plugin and will definitely be using it again on future projects, thanks so much for all the hard work you’ve put into it.

[Ian Gray]

Hope I can come in here…
I can see the argument both ways, however I just want to be able to customise the templates. Unfortunately it seems in EO Pro that there are very few templates that I can work on without having to hack at the core which of course will be overwritten on the next update.

I’ve had to add some classes to event_booking_table.php and form-customiser.php because I want the tables styled a certain way (I am using Twitter Bootstrap as my framework).

Is it possible to extend the cool templating system you have with EO to EO Pro?

[Stephen Harris]

@michael, not taken as unappreciative 🙂 – its great to have feedback like this. I’ll have a look into – unfortunately a lot of the capacity management logic assumes a booking is for only one event/date (i.e. queries confirmed booking for event, and then calculates the number of tickets sold/remaining).

@Ian – event_booking_table.php is for admin-side only, so there probably won’t be templates made available for that. The forum customiser is slightly different to other things the plug-in provides templates for so there won’t be template file, however I plan to add additional hooks and filters as part of a general refactoring of the customiser – you can use these to customise the output of the form. I shall also make the ‘base’ of the booking section into an editable template.

1.1 is the last stages of beta-testing, and 1.2 will be focussing on bookees (booking history, events a user is attending etc).
Improvements to the form customiser (beyond that which is 1.1) is earmarked for 1.3 (~June/July) (I’m generally trying to keep updates focussed, and smaller but frequent to ensure stability between versions).

[Ian Gray]

That sounds great. I need to get up to speed with WP hooks and filters, but I guess this should help me achieve what I want to achieve. Keep up the good work!

[Author]

Posts