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kovshenin edited this page Jul 30, 2012 · 24 revisions

CampTix is an easy to use event ticketing plugin for WordPress.

Getting Started

After installing and activating the plugin, you'll need to setup your PayPal API key in Tickets > Setup. PayPal has a good article on Obtaining API Credentials. If you're using the PayPal Sandbox, make sure you enable Sandbox Mode in CampTix. Click here for more information about the Sandbox.

Configuring PayPal IPN

CampTix will automatically choose the correct IPN URLs for PayPal to send notifications to, but you'll have to make sure that IPN is turned on for your PayPal account. Go to Profile > My Selling Tools > Instant payment notifications > Enable. You will be asked to enter a notifications URL, you can just use your site URL, and make sure you select Receive IPN messages.

Tickets and Coupons

As soon as PayPal is configured, you should create a ticket or two and start selling.

Creating Tickets

After your PayPal account has been set up, browse to Tickets and create a new ticket, just like you would create a new post or page. Tickets have a few different options and fields, here's a quick overview:

  • Ticket Title - as the name suggests, this is the ticket title which will be displayed on the ticketing page, an will appear in your PayPal reports and receipts

  • Ticket Excerpt - this is a description of what the ticket includes, like lunch, a T-shirt, parking and so on. The excerpt will appear below the ticket title on the ticketing page.

  • Price - the price of one ticket in the selected currency. You can change the currency Tickets > Setup

  • Quantity - the maximum number of tickets to sell. As soon as this amount of tickets is sold, the ticket is no longer visible on the ticketing page.

  • Availability - optional fields to restrict the availability of the ticket purchase to certain dates. You can use these fields to create early-bird tickets at a cheaper price. To avoid selling tickets during or after your event, it's a good idea to set the tickets end date to the date of your event.

  • Questions - you can use this section to build the form users have to fill in, before they can purchase their tickets.

You can save your ticket at any time, and as soon as you're comfortable with the ticket settings, hit Publish.

Opening Ticket Sales

After publishing a ticket or two, your sales are open, but to actually allow people to purchase a ticket, you'll need to create the ticketing form. Create a new (or use an existing) page and add the [camptix] shortcode somewhere in your content. It's best to have only one single page with such a shortcode and CampTix will use it for pretty much everything:

  • List tickets available for purchase
  • Show the attendee and checkout form
  • Show a receipt after returning from PayPal
  • Show an edit attendee information form

The text before and after the shortcode will be shown in all the above cases, so don't write things like "use the form below..." since there might be no form at all.

Creating and Using Coupons

Coupons are discount codes you can give to your attendees. To create a new coupon code, browse to Tickets > Coupons and create a New Coupon. The fields are quite self-explanatory:

  • Title - the coupon code. This is the code people will type in to get their discount. It's not case sensitive, so Coupon will work the same as COUPON or cOuPOn.

  • Discount - can either be a fixed amount or a percentage, which will be deducted from the ticket price. If a ticket price is $10 and the discount is set to $3 or 30%, people will be able to purchase the ticket for $7.

  • Quantity - the maximum number of times this coupon can be used. Note, that if the coupon quantity is more than one, an event attendee can purchase as much tickets as the coupon quantity will allow them to. This means they are not restricted to a single coupon usage per purchaser. If you'd like a coupon to be used only once, create a coupon and set the quantity to one.

  • Applies to - check the tickets that should be discounted when this coupon code is used. Note that when you create a new ticket, it will not automatically be discounted by the saved coupons. You will have to add them explicitly.

  • Availability - similar to tickets availability, defines the date period when the coupon can be used.

You can save the coupon as a draft at any point, but it has to be Published in order to work.

Attendees

Under Tickets > Attendees you will find a list of people who have signed up (or who have tried to sign up) for your event. You can use the search box to find attendees by name, e-mail, transaction ID, etc. Attendees can have several different statuses:

  • Published - form was filled out and payment was completed.
  • Draft - an attendee has filled the purchase form and sent to PayPal, but has not completed the payment at PayPal yet. Draft attendees will be set to Timeout if they never return from PayPal.
  • Pending - the payment was made, but was not completed yet, usually caused by echeck payments. Pending payments will be processed as soon as their status is changed at PayPal (if IPN is configured). Pending payments count towards the ticket totals, and are exported together with Published payments.
  • Cancelled - used when the buyer hits Cancel before completing the purchase at PayPal.
  • Timeout - when a purchase has been initiated but never completed, a Draft ticket will turn into this state.
  • Refunded - when a ticket is refunded, initiated by the buyer or the seller. You'll need a properly configured IPN to make this work.

You can further click on any of the attendees is the list to learn more about them. Note that changing statuses, creating or deleting attendees manually, may cause errors in your Revenue reports, so try to avoid that as much as possible.

The Tools Submenu

If you browse to Tickets > Tools you'll see a bunch of cool stuff that will help you with your ticketing workflow. Here's a brief description of each section:

  • Summarize - allows you to create a quick summary of all purchased tickets by their various fields, including ticket type, purchase date, coupon code, and all the various questions you have added to your tickets. This section will help you determine what T-shirt sizes to order, or the number of attendees who require a parking space. You can also export the chosen summary to CSV.

  • Revenue - will give you a quick snapshot of the financials and the total number of tickets sold and remaining. You can compare this data with your PayPal reports to make sure everything is going smooth.

  • Export - allows you to export all your attendee data in various formats. This is useful when you need to work with a badge-printing company (you can just send them the CSV), or print a registration list, or just backup your CampTix data.

  • Notify - is a very simple e-mail client. It allows you to send a message to your attendees, useful to send out reminders, or offers, before or after your event. You can even use shortcodes in your messages to make them more personalized. Hit the Preview button to see what a message will look like. At the bottom of the page you'll also find a History of sent messages.

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