Hello Event adds event management and ticket sales in an extremely easy way to any WordPress site! Just drop in the plugin and you’re ready to go. Welcome to the “Hello World” for events!
With this plugin you can easily create and manage events (like concerts, training camps or competitions). The events you create have fields for location, start and end dates (and optionally times for events that are not full-day events) and can be presented in different formats, both in lists and in calendars.
If you have installed WooCommerce you will be able to generate and sell tickets with a simple click. On the event page a link will point to the tickets in WooCommerce and in WooCommerce there will be a backlink from the ticket to the event.
Hello Event supports different date and time formats and is of course multi-lingual and currently comes with translations for English, French and Swedish. More languages will be added, and if you want to add other languages yourself, you can easily do that for example with the help of the Loco plugin.
Hello Event is iCal compatible and the event pages will display an “Add to calendar button” to allow users to insert the event into their calendars. Locations are presented either with Google Maps or OpenStreetMap.
Although the plugin is perfect to be used by the non-technical site creator, it is also developer-friendly with shortcodes, hooks and all styling provided by CSS that can be overridden.
To enhance the organic SEO of your site, all pages that present events provide Structured Data descriptions of the event – see Google documentation on Structured Data.
With Hello Event you can now use WooCommerce and all its different payment gateways to handle the ticket sales! Easy peasy!
Install the plugin the usual way, either through the plugin page in your WordPress dashboard or download the ZIP file and install it. Activate the plugin on the plugin page in your WordPress dashboard.
Upon activation the plugin will create a custom post type for the events. If WooCommerce is installed it will also create a product category for event tickets. If WooCommerce is installed later, this category will be created automatically when needed.
On the plugin setting page you will be able to define the name of the event type. Default is “Event” but since this name may conflict with other custom post types you already have in your system, you will be able to give it a different name, to keep the admin menu tidy and clear.
The best way to present the events is to create a dedicated page for this and use the shortcodes provided by the plugin to display calendars and/or lists of events.
Creating this dedicated page to present the events is very simple using shortcodes provided by the plugin. By adding the following content to a page, events will be presented in different ways:
[hello-event-calendar] Future events: [hello-event-list] Past events: [hello-event-list select="past" limit=2] TABS: [hello-event-tabs show="full"]
For a full description the these shortcodes, see below.
In the plugin settings you can choose to have the event information (dates, location, etc.) displayed completely automatically. Nothing could be simpler!
If you want more control over the page-layout, the plugin offers several possibilities to build a customised presentation:
This is further explained here: Hello Event – Customised Presentation of Events
In the Tickets section when editing an event you will find a checkbox “Sell tickets in the shop”. By checking the checkbox and saving the event a WooCommerce product is created with the same name, short description and thumbnail as the event. A new link will also appear in the Ticket section “Edit ticket”. This link takes you to the product in WooCommerce.
Please notice that for the ticket to be available in the shop you need to give it a price and set its status to “published” from the WooCommerce product page.
By setting the “Manage stock” in the “Inventory” section of the product page it is also possible to limit the number of tickets available.
Once the ticket has been created from the event as described above, the event and the ticket will live separate lives and you may change the titles, descriptions and thumbnails independently. The only exception is that if you untick the “Sell tickets in the shop” checkbox on the event page the corresponding product will be set to draft status and will not available in the shop. To make it available for sale again you should check the checkbox AND change the product status to “published”.
When you list the events in the WordPress admin area you will have direct access both to the tickets in Woocommerce and to the sales reports for each event.
| Shortcode | Parameters | Description |
|---|---|---|
| [hello-event-calendar] | view, view_selector | Returns a calendar of events. OPTIONAL PARAMETERS: view can be any of 'month' (default), 'week' or 'day' to decide how the calendar is presented. When view_selector set to "true" the calendar header includes buttons to switch between the views |
| [hello-event-list] | limit, select, show, link_to_book, thumbnail | Returns a list of events. OPTIONAL PARAMETERS: limit: max number of events to show (4); select that can take the values 'past' or 'future' ('future') ; show that can take the values 'minimal, 'default' or 'full' ('default') to select how much information to show for each event. link_to_book (false) if tru: include a link to book ticket if tickets are available. thumbnail: 'square' or 'round' or both to determine how event thumbnails are shown |
| [hello-event-tabs] | limit, show, link_to_book | Returns a tabbed presentation of earlier and upcoming events. For the parameters, see [hello-event-list] |
Using the shortcode provided, the calendar can be displayed either on the Events Archive page that you have created or in a widget area e.g. in a sidebar.
On the plugin options page you can select the action to take when a user clicks on an event in the calendar. By default this will open a modal (using the jQuery UI Modal library) with short information about the event from the excerpt that you have written. If your theme uses Bootstrap you may choose to display a Bootstrap modal instead. As a third possibility, you may also choose to redirect the user directly to the event page. The calendar uses ajax to pull in the events in order to make it robust and scalable to a very large number of events.
To learn more:
The plugin logo and banner are created from an image designed by Freepik