Creating your first event in WordPress is usually a very easy task. First of all, you’ll need a WordPress event booking plugin, which is EventPrime. And then, all you have to do is set the event’s name and time. That’s it. Your event will be created and visible to your site visitors on the event calendar. The process to accept event registration and bookings requires setting up a few more options though. In this blog post, we are going to see how you can enable event booking and user registrations for your WordPress events.
Prerequisites
This guide is going to assume that you already have an event for which you want to enable bookings. Or, that you are already familiar with the basic event creation process. If your answer is no to both of these perquisites, then I recommend that you check out our official Starter Guide to know how to create basic events in WordPress.
Enabling Bookings With WordPress Event Booking Plugin
Enabling bookings on existing events is a matter of only 3 clicks.
First step, visit the ‘Events‘ page of EventPrime in the WordPress Dashboard. Now, click on an existing event. This will open up the edit event form. From this form, click on ‘Tickets’ present in Event Settings. Then, click on the ‘Turn bookings on‘ checkbox. Then, just click on ‘Update‘.
When you enable bookings on an event, you also get the option to set the booking price. Keep this ‘0’ if you want to have free bookings for your event. If you set a booking price, do make sure that you have your payment gateway configured from the Settings.
To add other details regarding booking you can change in Event Settings.
More WordPress Event Booking Options in Event Settings
Inside event settings, you can see there are a lot more options related to bookings. When ‘Enable Bookings‘ checkbox is checked, you get the following additional options to set:
- Start Booking Date – The date and time when event bookings will open
- Last Booking Date – The date and time when event bookings will close
- Booking Price – Unit price of each booking for this event
- Hide Booking Status – Enabling this option will not display the event booking status on the event page
- Allow Cancellations – Enable this option if you’d like to allow booking cancellations for your event attendees
These options add more to the standard booking process that you get on the event calendar view.
Bookings on the Frontend
Once you have configured the booking process for your event from the backend, you’ll get to see the ‘Book Now‘ button on the event on the frontend. This means event attendees can now book their presence at your event. However, if you have set the booking start date after the current date, then the ‘Book Now‘ button will not display. Instead, it’ll say that ‘Bookings Haven’t Started Yet‘. The ‘Book Now‘ button will only appear between the booking start date and the booking end date.
Event bookings require an attendee to be a registered user on your WordPress site. If an attendee is not already registered, he/she will be asked to register as a user on your site first. Once registered, the user can book for an event as attendee.
To view a list of all attendees for an event (or all events), just visit the ‘Bookings‘ menu under ‘EventPrime‘ in the WordPress Dashboard. How to manage attendees from this list will be discussed in a separate blog post. Till then, let us know your feedback on the booking process in the comments below.