RSVP Pro Plugin

Easy RSVP and Event Management for WordPress

Announcements

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RSVP Pro’s 1st Birthday

One year ago today (10/13/2014) I released RSVP Pro to the world. Since it has been a year I wanted to reflect on the good and bad. First some statistics:

  • 82 releases since this year
  • ~130 customers

I am pretty happy with both of these since there have been zero marketing efforts except for a link or two from the free version of the plugin. Thanks to many of my customers in giving me feedback and reporting issues. It always amazes me at the different ways people can use a product.

The Good

So many more new features have been released this year than I thought would happen. As more and more people used the plugin and gave me feedback it was important for me to deliver the functionality to let people have a successful event. Some of the larger features that were added after the initial release are:

  • An optional wizard like front-end user experience
  • Ability to easily email all or selected attendees
  • Sub-events including open and private events

The Bad

There wasn’t anything specifically bad that happened. The only thing that was “bad” was I hoped for more sales and sales to pick-up “magically” that is my own fault. It still sucks though :).

What is ahead?

Many things! To summarize though I want to finish up my ideas on how to make the RSVP Pro plugin easier to use and I am going to focus a little bit on marketing to help build an audience. My goals is to make this the easiest to use and full-featured event management or RSVP plugin for WordPress.

 

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Multi-site license vs. Single license

One fairly common use case for the RSVP Pro plugin is for event management and wedding companies to offer the plugin in a white label fashion. An easy way to do this is by enabling a WordPress Network (aka a multi-site instance), however, until recently the user experience was not the best in this case. Depending on how you wanted to look at it you were installing it on a single instance, however, you would get an error that the license was invalid. The multi-site license is a way to fix this so the error goes away and it continues to work better in a network.

Now when you install the pro version of the plugin and network activate it you can specify the license in the network admin section. As long as you have a multi-site license everything will validate correctly and no more invalid license messages will appear.

What happens if you install the pro plugin on just one blog in a network with a single-site license? It will operate just like you would have if you had installed it on a standalone WordPress instance as it should.

The other use case for a multi-site license is if you are a consulting shop that is going to end up using it on more than nine sites and so instead of doing multiple purchases you can just purchase it once and use the same license key for all of the sites.

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Max Attendees and Waitlist Functionality

The RSVP Pro plugin was just released with a few more features that have been asked for recently. These features are the ability to set a max attendee limit and also to have a wait list. These two options can be found under each event’s general setting tab. A screen capture of the two options is shown below.

max_guest_wailist_option

The option, “Max guest limit for event,” is used to specify a guest limit it can be left blank and it is assumed there is no limit. Any positive non-zero number can be used for the guest limit. When a guest tries to be added and the limit is hit either a message will appear or they will show as having RSVP’d as “No.”

The option, “Allow for a wait list,” is used to enable the wait list. If a user tries to RSVP and the event is already at maximum capacity they can choose to say no or to be added to the wait list.

Besides these two main options there are also related text formatting options under the “text customizations” tab.

waitlist_text_customization

How did these features help you in your event? We would love to hear about it.

Does the RSVP Pro plugin not exactly fit what you need? Please get in touch and we will see what we can do for you.

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Wizards, Variables and Custom Questions Oh My!

The last few months has been filled with many releases and new features. I wanted to talk about a few that have been released to the RSVP Pro plugin.

Multi-Step Registration

Probably the biggest feature was the addition of an option to change the front-end form from one long form to a wizard-like interface. Where the first step is filling out a person’s information (name, email, etc..) and the next step(s) is answering information about events. This makes the UI cleaner and user-friendly as people are not given a huge wall of options that they have to deal with. To turn on the option go to the main event’s settings then click “form customizations” then finally select the option “Change the frontend to have multiple steps” wizard_option

Once that option is turned on the front-end will now be in wizard mode which look different once a user finds their name and/or creates a new user.

Mail Message Variables

The ability to send messages to attendees is useful but there are still many ways we want to see it improved. One of the items on our list was the creation of placeholders in the subject and message. Now that is possible, you can put in placeholders for an attendees: first and last name, email address, passcode and the URL for the event.

If you are looking for additional features in the message sending functionality drop us a line we would love to hear from you.

Additional Custom Question Types

The last feature I want to mention is two new custom question types: read only and admin only. These new custom question types come from user feedback. Often people wanted to be able to display a notice mixed in with the custom questions or let attendees see a value that they couldn’t change but should be able to see, such as table assignment. The read only type allows for those scenarios.

The admin-only scenario is a different but along the same vein as read only. In some cases there might be a value that needs to be associated with the attendee but that they should never see. This is where the admin only custom question is used.

 

Hopefully these new features will be helpful in managing your event and attendees. If there is anything missing in the RSVP Pro plugin that you would like to see added we welcome any and all constructive feedback.

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Styling the RSVP Plugin

The RSVP and RSVP Pro plugin purposely don’t do much in the way of styling. We inherit almost all styling from whatever theme is being used. The reason for this is we want to try and make everything look as similar as possible. In this post I am going to go through some of the style classes that exist in the RSVP plugins and go through one quick example that only pertains to the pro version.

The post assumes some familiarity with stylesheets and how you can use your theme’s stylesheet to modify the look and feel of the site as a whole.

Available styles

  • rsvpPlugin – ID of the main RSVP Container. Each RSVP step will be wrapped in this container
  • rsvpParagraph – Class name that is used for all paragraph tags on the front end portion of the RSVP
  • rsvpFormField – Class for divs that surround a given form input, which is a combination of a label and at least one form input (could be multiple form inputs)
  • rsvpAdditionalAttendee – Class for the div container that holds each additional RSVP attendee you are associated with
  • additionalRsvpContainer – The container that holds the plus sign that allows for people to add additional attendees
  • rsvpCustomGreeting – ID for the custom greeting div that shows up if that option is enabled
  • rsvpBorderTop – Class for setting a top border on certain divs in the main input form
  • rsvpCheckboxCustomQ – Class for the div that surrounds each custom question checkbox
  • rsvpClear – A class for div elements that we want to use to set clear both. Currently used only next to rsvpCheckboxCustomQs as they are floated
  • rsvpRsvpQuestionArea (Pro Only) – A class for the RSVP attending question

An example…

Now what would we do if we want to change the radio buttons to be more like buttons side by side in the pro plugin? Well… we would leverage the rsvpRsvpQuestionArea class to modify the styles and use the fact that the labels act as buttons for the radio buttons.  Before styling them this is what the “yes”/”no” question looks like in the plugin.

default_radio_buttons

Now let’s open up the theme’s style.css and add in the following styles

.rsvpRsvpQuestionArea input[type="radio"] {
display: none!important;
}
.rsvpRsvpQuestionArea label {
background-color: green;
color: white;
padding: 10px;
}
.rsvpRsvpQuestionArea {
display: inline-block;
height: 30px;
}

What we did here was hide the radio button, we had to use the !important keyword because the RSVP stylesheet gets loaded first and we try and prevent the radio buttons being hidden.

We then make the labels green with white text and display them side by side. The end results looks like

radios_as_buttonsThis works well but we can’t tell which item is selected. So, let’s change that!


.rsvpRsvpQuestionArea input[type="radio"]:checked + label {
background-color: blue;
}

With this added style we set the label that is next to the radio that is checked to have a background-color of blue. Which now makes the buttons look like radio_selected_buttonNow our “radio” buttons look like styled buttons.

This is just an example of how the RSVP plugin can be styled. If you are ever stuck and need some help feel free to reach out to us we are here to help.

Happy styling!