Evaluating this & have some questions…

@petervandoorn

Here are some answers below. We do cover some of these in videos on our https://opentickets.com/videos page.

1. The tickets don’t show up on the shop page by design, since ticket purchases are for specific Events, not individual Products. When you create a Ticket product it is set to ‘hidden from catalog’.

The Community Edition has a Event Calendar template you can use to display upcoming events, or you can make your own page and link to individual Chilld Events (specific events, not the Parent description)

YOu can also just create your own display and links to the events.

2. When you ‘view event’ page in the WP admin, you won’t see a ticket link. At the top of the Events posts, look at all Events and you can click the ‘Child’ Event to see the ticket link.

3. Sure! It’s open source, you can edit the code and PDF template. There is no tool to do that on Community, but you can edit the code to do whatever you want.

4. Yes, each ticket has their own unique QR code, whether GA or Seated.

5. On next release this is changing to /event

6. So on this question: Community is Free, and there are extensions you can buy for very little money. Enterprise has every feature we’ve ever written, and is a completely different codebase. Community is completely free… so not sure what you are asking here…

@petervandoorn if you have other questions, you can email [email protected] as well. Marking this one resolved, reopen it if there are further questions.

Hi. Thanks for the response.

1 & 2 are disappointing as it does limit the scope of your otherwise excellent product – not everyone is up to creating their own code to display the single events.

3 – any clues as to which file to edit? Do you have template overrides like Woocommerce does, or do I have to edit the core plugin file and lose my changes every time it’s updated?

4 – I did a test purchase of 3 tickets on the same order, and all 3 display the same QR code. How, then, can I get them to have unique codes?

5 – yay ??

6 – Not so much as question as an observation – ie, your licence fee of $999 per year AND a commission on the sales is way too expensive. As well as my charity, I am also evaluating this for a large commercial organiser of art airs, and there is no way that they will pay this when all of the other solutions on the market have annual licences in the low hundreds, which is a shame as, so far (above aside) I am impressed.

Cheers

@petervandoorn 1 & 2 – we hear you. There are some other display widgets in progress. This is a free plugin which we thought developers would use, but it seems that it has a wider audience than we anticipated.

3. Well, you would want to create a child theme, and then the templates would be local so you could update the theme without losing changes.

4. This was a miscommunication – For GA tickets (sorry, was thinking seated). Those tickets are on the same order in GA so have the same code, since they were the same Name on the tickets, so they have the same code. HOwever, that code is limited on checkin to that quantity in the order. In your example, you can test this by printing 5 of that ticket, and using a Qr reader to check them in. There is no security without scanning the QR code.

For seated, it’s one per seat, so unique QR code per seat.

6. We appreciate your feedback, and FYI effective at USITT we’re changing to a Tiered pricing model rather than any service fee. If you have any example of a comparable system with all the enterprise features for ‘hundreds’, please email us at [email protected] with the names of them. We’ve never seen a system with these features for this low an annual cost.

Thanks again.

With 3, I didn’t know you can make a child of a plugin. Or are you getting a little confused as your plugin is a plugin and not a theme.

I’ll try rewording my question: You say that I can edit the ticket display php file, but obviously that file will get replaced when you update the plugin. I was asking if your plugin supports template overrides like Woocommerce does – ie, can I copy the relevant file to my theme folder and it will use that version to display the tickets and make the PDF?

I’m assuming that it’s the file called basic-ticket.php, so can I copy that file to my theme’s root folder, or does it need to go in a specific directory (like Woocommerce files need to go in a folder called ‘woocommerce’ ?)

Hey @petervandoom. You have a lot f excellent questions here. I will attempt to clarify some of the answers and will also address the unanswered ones as well.

1. Why are tickets not in the shop?
The system is designed in such a way that ticket prices (the ticket products themselves) can be reused, across multiple events, and across multiple ‘showings’ of those events. Imagine, for a moment, a theater that tells 10 stories (shows) a year, with 20 showings each, for a total of 200 discreet showings total. Many theaters have pricing based on the available seating rather than a specific price per show, though sometimes it can be. Thus throughout the entire year, a general admission ticket may cost $10, no matter what show is currently running. In this system, you can create a single ‘general admission $10’ ticket, and reuse it for every show (or at least several of them), eliminating the need to create a unique ticket product for each show/showing.

This idea becomes much more of a big deal when taking into account our GAMP plugin and the current Enterprise Edition. In both of these, you can have complex pricing tables on a per event basis if needed. In those cases, having the ability to reuse a price over and over without creating a new WooCommerce product, can be a godsend.

Because these tickets can be reused, that creates a paradox when it comes to a ticket product. A stand alone ticket product is simply an unassociated item, with no mata, that someone paid $10 for. Because the ticket is reusable, we have no real idea what show it is for, let alone what showing of that show. Since a ticket is basically a meaningless purchase without knowing what showing the ticket is for, we made the decision to prevent them from showing in the shop. This is mostly an accounting and reporting decision, since we need to be able to clearly identify which showing a ticket is for, in order to properly tally reports or show how well a show did, financially (which really comes more into play in Enterprise Edition and our reporting plugin, which is on the way).

In short, tickets really can’t be in the shop. The actual ticket products mean nothing unless they are associated to a specific show and showing, other than $10 of income. Truthfully if you only need to show the income, and not actually associate a ticket purchase to an event, then you can already do that with standalone WooCommerce. Based on your use case however, it seems like you may be one of our customers that upgrade to either Enterprise or to at least some plugins that provide reporting, so that you can see how each event performs.

2. Event description page does not have the ticket purchase UI. Why?
The thought here is that most people seem to find it useful to see a calendar of upcoming events. With that in mind, mostly people should be coming through the calendar page, if they are just arriving at your site organically. You do bring up a valid point however, which is that there should be a way to have a page that has the event description on it, as well as a list of the upcoming showings of that event (as opposed to a calendar of all upcoming events).

In Enterprise Edition, this is solved by the addition of a few helpful widgets, one of which is the ‘Upcoming Events’ widget. It pretty much does exactly what you describe. Being a ‘smart widget’, you can put it on a sidebar that is shown on the ‘event pages’, and it knows which event page you are on, and shows the upcoming showings of that event only. A plugin that includes this functionality (instead of buying the entire Enterprise License) is in the works, which would include this as well as several other features. As of right now however, this is only available in the Enterprise Edition.

3. Can I have a custom Ticket Template, and where would the files live?
OpenTickets was mostly designed with developers in mind. It does have many many hooks that can allow you to overtake many parts of the software, or at least add to or modify how it works. A large reason for this is because we ourselves have plugins that integrate with it, and those integrations sometimes vastly change the entire functionality of a feature, like the GAMP plugin.

That being said, yes you can make a custom display of the ticket, and without needing to ‘edit the plugin’, which as you point is out is not preferable since it gets blown out on update. You can overtake the files by adding your custom versions to your theme, similar to WooCommerce. In your theme, simply add a directory called ‘tickets’, and add the customized ‘basic-ticket.php’ and ‘basic-style.css’ files to that directory. Once that is done, the software knows to check there first for the ticket template, and then fallback to the one shipped with the plugin if those customizations do not exist.

Example: /wp-content/themes/my-theme/tickets/basic-ticket.php

A side note here is that doing this will affect the display of all tickets on the site. There are plans for a plugin that allows cascading customized tickets, which would allow you to have a different style per event if needed, but that is a ways down the list of plugins to be built. It can technically be accomplished in the Enterprise Edition, but truth be told, it is a little hackish to setup currently, since it has never really be requested.

4. Unique QR codes for multiple General Admission tickets?
On general admission tickets purchased on the same order, there are not unique QRs. This is primarily because in WooCommerce they are stored as a single product with a quantity, with really no unique identifying information per ticket. Because of this blatant lack of unique information, there is not really anything that can be used to make the QRs unique, save for adding a random number to the data encoded in the QR, which has it’s own set of complications.

Instead of enforcing a unique QR per general admission ticket on a given order, what we have done is implemented a limit to the number of times that same QR can be checked in, using the check-in feature. Lets say for instance that you only purchased 5 tickets.

If you try to scan the QR 6 times, the first 5 will go through, but the 6th one will error out, and say that you have already check-in all of them. Logically this still works the same way, so long as you are actually using the QR to check people in. If you are not using the QR, then you are basically falling into the same situation with any other ticket system offering general admission tickets where people can abuse your tickets by simply distributing 1000 copies of their ticket. Unless your audience is generally trustworthy, and you can employ the ‘honor system’, then I highly recommend using the QR, which will prevent such abuse. You can use most QR apps, but I know for a fact that NeoReader (iDevices) and QRDroid (android devices) generally work very well for the job.

5. Can I change the /qsot-events/ to /super-awesome-events/ in the permalinks?
Not yet. As @quadshot said however, this will be a setting in the next release. This is generally useful, and truth be told, I thought I had already added it, but it seems I was mistaken.

6. The price point is actually very competitive, if you take into consideration the features that actually come with Enterprise Edition, and compare that to other products with similar capabilities. If you are comparing the ‘bare bone I can barely sell tickets’ versions of other softwares to our Enterprise Edition, then of course you are going to see a huge price difference. However if you are comparing apples to apples, you will find that we beat them almost every time, even many cloud solutions. In fact, OpenTickets Community Edition on it’s own beats out many of our paid competitors, without any add ons. That being said, if you truly are comparing apples to apples, and actually do see a huge price gap between us and another product that has comparable features, the please, by all means shoot us an email at [email protected] with the relevant information, so that we can do a proper internal evaluation and make any needed adjustments.

By the by, as mentioned on our website, we do offer a substantial discount for non-profits. Reach out either on the site or shoot an email to [email protected] and start that conversation, because it will be worth it. It sounds like your situation could definitely use the Enterprise Edition, so it can’t hurt to get every discount you can. ??

General Notes
I am truly glad that just by evaluating the Community Edition you are impressed. That being said, I think you will find that Enterprise Edition, or really any of our extensions, really shine. We work hard, and it is always nice to hear a complement.

What @quadshot was trying to say (where your thought he might have been confused above) was a shorter version of my answer on #3 above. Despite that, to kind of expand on the inadvertent question you had in your response: you are correct that currently there is no such thing as a child plugin; however, you can have a separate plugin that integrates with our plugin, like our plugin integrates with WooCommerce. If you happen to be motivated enough to dig into the code of our plugin and write your own to implement some custom functionality, by all means DO IT, and don’t forget to SHARE IT with the community ??

Hopefully, this clears up some of your questions, and it may lead to more, which is fine too. I always enjoy answering excellent questions, especially universal ones that I am sure is on other people’s minds too. Definitely reach out about the non-profit discount, as I am sure you will be surprised with it.

Loushou

Wow @loushou, that’s a fabulously comprehensive response! Thanks!

It answers everything, but there are a couple of things that I think you should consider.

I understand fully about the way that you are utilising WooCommerce products to create the ticket types, but since you do use WooCommerce, it’s not unreasonable for people to expect the events to appear in the shop and be confused when they don’t.

On the subject of unique QR codes that would be easy to address. I understand that the software will, for example, not allow a 6th check-in after the 5 that have been purchased have been scanned. However, you could simply add a tiny bit to the URL along the lines of &ticket=2, &ticket=4, etc.

Both of these ideas do hold water. I will do some thinking on the idea of allowing the tickets to appear in the shop, and how we might actually accomplish this and still allow them to work. Once I have a plan of action I will start a internal conversation about it. As for the QR codes, I will also be doing some thinking on this. It does seem like this could be a good compromise that could work; however, I want to make sure I cover all my bases on what adding this change may affect. If it pans out, that could be in the next release too. In the mean time, I am glad I was able clear things up, and if you have more questions, do not hesitate to ask.

Loushou

Hello,
I’m currently using openticket for a few weeks now and i love it, despite that there are 2 things i would like to change, I wan to change ( Reserve some tickets:) to say (Buy Tickets) and the (Reserve button) i want it to say (Buy Now)
i tried editing the php file but when i refresh the page it shows the new title for a few seconds then it went back to it’s original text.

Please help