Event Espresso headquartered in Utah offers an event registration and management platform supplying automated help for ticketing and ticket purchases, registration forms and pricing, promotions and correspondences (e.g. email), multiple attendee registration, and other features.
$79.95
per year
Sublime Text
Score 9.1 out of 10
N/A
Sublime Text is a highly customizable text editing solution featuring advanced API, Goto functions, and other features, from Sublime HQ in Sydney.
As far as I have found, Event Espresso has no peer. Yes, there are other WordPress plugins that provide for event registration, including a few available through Code Canyon, but none of them promise the rich feature set and robust support of Event Espresso. It seems to be the only real game in town, but luckily it's a good product. It's highly extensible, so it should scale well to any size or type of event. Through add-ons, it's doubtful there is an event scenario it can't handle. And because it runs on WordPress, you can incorporate it as part of your site--the plugin even does a good job of picking up design cues from your theme, or you can customize it using CSS.
My CMS has a small window in which I can edit custom HTML/CSS. It can be expanded some, but not as much as I would like. It also displays all code as dark text on a white background. On a page where I am doing extensive custom coding, it is helpful to see it in a larger window and in a color-coded display so that I don't have to strain my eyes as hard. Especially when I'm trying to scan for specific elements and target issues and so that I don't have to scroll endlessly in a tiny window.
Integrating account creation with WordPress should be included in the core product, not an add-on. It's extremely frustrating to have to pay extra for that, especially when that add-on is not as flexible as it needs to be (for example, if someone is enrolling for a class on behalf of someone else).
The data visualization is a mess. That feature doesn't seem to ever work and it should be left out until it does.
The ability to show participant data on the front end is extremely limited. Event Espresso does provide a few hooks and some limited documentation on this feature, but I feel it should be more robust. Perhaps that can be a focus of future releases.
This is a programmers tool. As such a lot of the features and benefits are lost on a non-technical user. To get the most out of the tool you need to have a basic crash course in how it works and what it can do. The documentation and community are good, but it takes a bit of time to get up to speed.
Never had to use their customer support before. There is ample documentation online so it's straightforward to find a solution to any problem you might encounter. For example, I needed to convert a string of HTML code to a properly formatted HTML file to "modify." Easy to do when there are so many users of the product who have needed to do that same thing before.
I looked at EventBrite, but it wasn't customizable enough for our needs and didn't provide the level of integration with our website that I desired. I also looked at the ticketing system offered by The Events Calendar for WordPress (by Modern Tribe), but it too lacked the feature set we needed. Only Event Espresso offered all the features, customization, and integration we desired and needed.
We've used both Notepad++ and Atom; both are great but nothing really beats the Sublime Text UI; super intuitive and friendly and does everything you need without overwhelming you with stuff you don't. Other options are free, but for our organization, it was well worth the small license cost for the persistent use of a great product.
Event Espresso has literally changed the lives of our volunteer organization, saving hundreds of hours of time and eliminating the frustration of paper enrollment.
The add-ons allow you to accomplish just about any event registration goals you might have. It's an extremely powerful product.
Integrating the plugin into our website was a breeze, and it's approachable enough where volunteers can create the classes and conduct the online enrollment all in a web browser.
Sublime Text has helped me to focus on specific tasks, cutting out the clutter that many other IDEs have. As such, it has helped me be a more productive employee because I don't get dazed by hundreds of buttons. I can focus on just the code.
Sublime Text is so affordable that it's a no-brainer to have an extra tool in your toolset.
The Search features of Sublime Text are so useful that it has saved me a great amount of time compared to using Find & Replace menus in Xcode, Android Studio, or Eclipse.
