Social Media Buttons

Now includes Facebook and Twitter share buttons and an updated calendar.

Among several minor bug fixes etc, we have included a simple social media plugin/addon that can be used to display Twitter and Facebook buttons in your Event Espresso templates. If you have relocated your template files to your uploads folder, you will need to make these changes to your template files.

I have also provided templates for the payment and return to payment pages.

The calendar has also been updated to include weekly and daily agenda views and a settings page to manage the calendar options.

Calendar Week View

Here is a list of recent changes between the last four versions.

Changes:
3.0.16
Added simple buttons for Twitter and Facebook. Templates have been updated to include these changes.
Added payment and return to payment templates.
Added required text to form fields.
Added a new function to Get a single start or end time:
* function event_espresso_get_time($event_id, $format = ‘start_time’)
* @params $event_id (required)
* @params $time (optional, start_time (default) | end_time)
Changed the plugin to use the built in jQuery library, instead of the Google jQuery API.
Adjusted the questions display query to order by group order. This will work if the users do use the group_order field. Otherwise the questions will get mixed up.
Added the search and replace values to the invoice email

3.0.15
Moved the system questions and question groups function into the database install scipt. Hopefully this will fix the problem with the system questions and groups not getting installed.

3.0.14
Applied some formatting to the category name in the category listing.
Removed the wpautop function from the category editor.
Added the end_date of an event to the event_list.php.
Fixed the following issues
1) Edited questions always defaulting to ‘required’.
2) Deleting of questions and groups via checkbox.

Download your copy now!

Follow us on Twitter @EventEspresso

#WP #eventprofs #plugin

Now he has taken the events of this past weekend and has given us an example (and a plugin) of how to attach images to your WordPress RSS feeds.

In a recent blog post, Event Espresso goes head-to-head with Eventbrite. While Event Espresso boasts no per event registration fees and transaction fees and your customer’s data is stored safely on your server. Event Espresso comes out looking like the best option for a self-hosted event registration and management systems. The Eventbrite hosted event management system continues to hammer you with outrageous fees.

For a limited time, get $10 off the basic license using the discount code EVENTBRITE when checking out.

Read the full story >>

I have been following this whole episode from the very beginning. After reading the post “Syn-thesis 3: Switchers” I added my own reply about how I feel about the GPL and how it has affected my own WordPress plugin, Event Espresso. As time went on, more people added their comments/experiences with GPL compliance pertaining to how it affects their business (big or small) and why they don’t think that being GPL compliant will work for their business.

There were two comments (by Ash and Liz) in particular that I wanted to reply to, but the comments for the post were closed. So I sent Matt the following letter, via his contact form.

Hi Matt,

Sorry to bug you on your contact form. I wanted to reply to Liz and Ash about how the GPL license CAN and DOES work for small business, but I noticed that replies were turned off or not working.

I just wanted to give them an example of my situation and how I made the GPL work for my own small business.

In my situation, my web design business was not doing so well. I had a pretty hard time competing with some of the bigger web design firms in my area, as well as competition from design firms in India and other developing countries that offer much lower prices for the same work.

How does this pertain to the GPL?

Well, my wife Shelly is into stamping, crafting and scrap booking. She holds stamping/crafting/scrap booking classes and workshops in our basement about once or twice a month. Ironically, every year (over the last 5 years or so) she has an event called “Stamp Camp” where about 20-30 women show up at a local church or restaurant to learn how to make custom hand made cards, scrap book pages, and other fun stuff using rubber stamps.

I had almost given up on web development, when Shelly asked me to make her an online registration and payment system for an up-coming Stamp Camp. So I figured I would find a plugin in the WP plugin directory, but I had a hard time finding something that met her needs. So I created my own event registration and management plugin then added it to the plugin repository. After a short time, people started using the plugin and asking for more features, requesting support, etc.

As you can imagine I became pretty busy, and a few people were paying me for support or the addition of features. I started realizing that maybe I should add some of these features to a premium version of the plugin and sell a support license for it. This way I could keep the plugin under a GPL license and still make a little money for all of the hard work I had done. So I started selling a premium version (support license) of the plugin (“Advanced Events Registration“) on my blog.

How does being GPL compliant help my business?

Over the course of about six months the premium version started selling pretty well. People continued to give me great feedback and even sending me their versions of the plugin with their modified code. (I did have a little hiccup early on when someone I brought on to help me demanded I change the licensing, but I managed to overcome this poison and keep the license GPL compatible in the end (making me feel much better about the plugin and its development.))

The plugin has become very beneficial to other small businesses/organizations since its conception and is being used all over the world. Keeping the plugin GPL compatible made it possible for other programmers to change the code to suit their or their clients needs. It has also saved many businesses/organizations hundreds and even thousands of dollars a year that they would have had to pay in fees and monthly services at other event registration companies, such as Eventbrite or Reg Online.

Selling a support license for the plugin and keeping it GPL compatible has turned out to be a good move for myself and my business. It has also afforded me the opportunity to keep my business running, as well as allowing me to  keep doing what I love.

Since the plugin has started becoming more recognized. I had to come up with a better name for it, because that name just wasn’t doing it for me. So I renamed it “Event Espresso“.

How did I come up with that name?

I love coffee and often frequent the local coffee shops around town. We have a calendar hanging on our wall at home that has different Italian restaurant or cafe themes on it for each month. One month it had a couple of large coffee cups on it and in fancy writing it said “Espresso!” So I started thinking to myself, “how can I tie espresso into the name of my plugin?” Then, just like that, it hit me! Event Espresso was born.

Thanks!

Seth Shoultes

Apparently several people have had the misfortune of downloading a pirated version of my Advanced Events Registration plugin from some file sharing websites. One person’s site was entirely overwritten with spam posts and links pirated software. While another persons entire website was completely wiped out.

The website owner (whom I wont mention here) actually threatened to sue me because five years worth of content was completely removed from their blog. When I asked for a copy of their receipt from the purchase of the premium plugin. The person stated they had downloaded it from a free file hosting website. Can you believe it! So I stated the obvious, “You didn’t purchase the plugin from my website, so you will need to contact whomever you received the files from. I am not responsible for code that may be distributed by outside sources.”

Moral of the story:

Premium plugins and themes may be GPL licensed (or not in some cases.) Unless you get them from a trusted source, you may be taking a major risk using them.

Related information:

How Downloading a Premium Theme/Plugin From the Wrong Place Can Ruin Your Site

Downloading a Premium Theme from the Wrong Site can be Expensive

Download Free Premium WordPress theme :What’s the Catch?

WordPress Premium Developer and Author Piracy My Thoughts

The Ethics of WordPress Themes at a Premium

As well as being an important and cost effective addition to many small organizations and blog owners, it has become a very successful event registration plugin for WordPress. It all started off as a small project for my wife. She needed a simple system for people to register for her scrap booking events. Being a part time PHP developer (as well as loving  husband), I volunteered to help out. So I set out to find a solution and found a very simple Event Registration plugin for WordPress by David Fleming, but it seemed to be missing some of the basic features my wife needed for her business/hobby. We needed a way to accept payments using the PayPal IPN and a bunch of other custom features that seemed to be missing from David’s plugin. (I am not putting down David’s plugin at all, it is a very nice plugin and helped me to get moving on something more advanced.)

So I started studying the WordPress Codex and reading up on how to build plugins in the WordPress environment. After a few weeks of programming and testing. I was able to put something together based on David’s original plugin (version 1.0 I believe.) After a couple more weeks of testing I released the plugin on the WordPress Plugin Directory one year ago today (April 20, 2009.)

After almost a year of user submitted input, I was able to release the Advanced Events Registration Pro version of the plugin. Since the release of the pro version on January 28, 2010, I have made several hundred improvements throughout. One of the latest (and biggest) improvements has been a complete overhaul of all the old code. It now relies heavily upon the core WordPress functions and coding standards. Making it easier to use and more WordPress friendly. I have a Member addon almost ready. Among other things, I have added a way to include your own custom PHP functions, shortcodes, include files, and a simple template system for displaying events. All of which are stored in the “/wp-content/uploads/eventregis/” directory, so you don’t have to worry about overwriting all of your custom additions.  I am also ramping up to release alternate payment gateways such as Authorize.net, 2Checkout, and Google Checkout payment systems.

I love hearing from users, so please tell me about your experience with this plugin.

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/