Event Listings and Registration Pages
This Wordpress plugin provides a way to take online registrations for events such as conference and seminars that are held live. The plugin uses the PayPal IPN to record payments to a database. It allows you to capture the registering persons contact information to the Wordpress database as well as provides the ability to send the registrar to your PayPal payment site for online collection of event fees. PayPal payments are captured to the database using the PayPal Standard IPN.
Reporting features provide a list of events, list of attendees, and excel export.
Download Plugin | View Example (free version) | Upgrade to Pro Version | Support Forum | Comment
If you like this plugin, please consider making a small donation or clicking on a few of the ads displayed on the site.
Installation:
- After unzipping, upload everything in the ‘paypal-events-registration’ folder to your ‘/wp-content/plugins/’ directory (preserving directory structure).
- Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.
- Go to the Event Registration Menu and Configure Organization and enter your company info – note you will need a PayPal id if you plan on accepting PayPal payments
- Go to the Event Setup and create a new event, make sure you select ‘make active’.
- Create a new page (not post) on your site. Put {EVENTREGIS} in it on a line by itself.
Note: if you are upgradings from a previous version please backup your data prior to upgrade.
If you have watched the video below and are having trouble installing the plugin or just need additional support. Please visit our “Premium Support” page or view the FAQ below.
Setting up the Plugin
Frequently Asked Questions:
To use, create a new page with only {EVENTREGIS}
To display list of attendees of an active event use {EVENTATTENDEES} on a page or post.
*For URL link back to the payment/thank you page use {EVENTREGPAY} on a new page.
*For PayPal to notify about payment confirmation use {EVENTPAYPALTXN} on a new page.
*This page should be hidden from from your navigation menu. Exclude pages by using the ‘Exclude Pages‘ plugin from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/exclude-pages/ or using the ‘exclude’ parameter in your ‘wp_list_pages’ template tag. Please refer to http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/wp_list_pages for more information about excluding pages.
Email Confirmations:
For customized confirmation emails, the following tags can be placed in the email form and they will pull data from the database to include in the email.
[fname], [lname], [phone], [event],[description], [cost], [company], [co_add1], [co_add2], [co_city],[co_state], [co_zip],[contact], [payment_url], [start_date], [start_time], [end_date], [end_time]
Sample Mail Send:
***This is an automated response – Do Not Reply***
Thank you [fname] [lname] for registering for [event]. We hope that you will find this event both informative and enjoyable. Should have any questions, please contact [contact].
If you have not done so already, please submit your payment in the amount of [cost].
Click here to review your payment information [payment_url].
Thank You.
Attendees and Payments
Screenshot of Events Registration with IPN Pro using the Calendar (Pro Version)
Screenshot of some Event Setup Options (Pro Version)
Events and Payments
Attention:
If you haven’t noticed, the Wordpress plugin “Events Registration with PayPal IPN” is no longer available for download on Wordpress.org. We found some serious security issues within the plugin (mostly deprecated Wordpress database functions) so we decided it best to go ahead and remove the plugin until security was improved.After a major overhaul of the back-end code we have re-released the plugin under a new name (Advanced Events Registration) and have also released a pro version of the plugin with many additional features.
It is highly recommended that you upgrade to the latest version of the Advanced Events Registration plugin ASAP.
For a couple of weeks I was trying to figure out why the database tables in my plugin weren’t getting updated when the plugin was installed or activated. I had recently written a function (based on this example) to create tables in my Wordpress plugin. I finally narrowed it down to the dbDelta function for Wordpress. After doing a few searches on Google I came across this article which explains the the dbDelta function in detail.
Come to find out I was missing a space between a ‘“‘ and a ‘(‘ as seen below.
$sql_create_table = "CREATE TABLE " . $wp_table_name . "( " . $sql . " );";
Here is how it should have looked:
$sql_create_table = "CREATE TABLE " . $wp_table_name . " ( " . $sql . " ) ;";
Notice the spaces highlighted in green? That was the killer. So for a while, every time I added a new field to a table in database install file. For a while I was using a function (seen below) to alter the table and add the new fields.
function add_column_if_not_exist($db, $column, $column_attr = "VARCHAR( 255 ) NULL" ){ global $wpdb; $exists = false; $columns = $wpdb->query("show columns from $db"); while($c = $wpdb->get_row($columns)){ if($c['Field'] == $column){ $exists = true; break; } } if(!$exists){ if (!$wpdb->query("ALTER TABLE `$db` ADD `$column` $column_attr")){ $error = 'There was a problem adding columns to the database.'; } } return $error; }
So, if you are having trouble with the dbDelta function when writing a Wrodpress plugin. Be aware of extra spaces 
Here is more information about the dbDelta function and creating tables with plugins:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Creating_Tables_with_Plugins
http://wordpress.org/tags/dbdelta-1
http://hungred.com/how-to/wordpress-dbdelta-function/
http://designoplasty.com/2009/05/15/not-using-dbdelta-with-wordpress/
Creating Login Panel with jQuery and CSS
Mohit Aneja over at CSS Jockey has created a pretty nice looking sliding login panel using Jquery and CSS. The sliding login panel is similiar to what can be seen on Twitter and few other popular websites. The script looks pretty lightweight, easy to use and is well documented. I may be using it soon (when I get around to re-designing this site.)
Check it out the full article here:
http://www.cssjockey.com/coding/jquery-css-login-panel
I have recently seen several websites that I maintain, as well as several that I don’t maintain, hacked by some kind of bot net. It has been a really good learning experience to say the least.
Most of the hacked websites were running Wordpress, so my first thought that it was some kind of security exploit in Wordpress. Then I was asked to investigate of a few static HTML or PHP driven websites without Wordpress installations. All of the hacks were very similar and had their index.php, index.html, and .htaccess files modified. In the index.php and index.html files there was javascript code and iframe virus codes appended to the end of the file that would try to install different variants of badware/malware to unsuspecting visitors. I even seen a file that had stripped out part of the code within the file and replaced it with the malicious javascript and iframe virus browser exploits. Therefore completely breaking the file (luckily we had a backup of the now broken file and were able to to get the site working again.) Read more
