Getting Started

The Client Portal for WordPress (CP4WP) plug-in is currently in beta, and will benefit greatly from all instances where you find a bug, potential improvement or feature request.

Your new website was built by See Tickets to effectively display your events for users on mobile and desktop. CP4WP uses Material Design by Google as a framework for the layout. You will see the option for Outlined or Elevated Material Card design. Outlined design has thin borders and no drop shadow. Elevated design includes drop shadows and no outline.

If you have not yet received the plug-in, contact design@seetickets.us for the latest version.

Plug-in Dependencies

Required Installation

Installation and Activation

Installing the CP4WP plug-in will follow the same steps as installing ACF. Go to Plug-in > Add New. This is not a plug-in published to the WordPress plug-in directory, so you will need to upload the plug-in manually using the Upload Plug-in button. 

As mentioned, if the Advanced Custom Fields plug-in is not installed prior, an error message will appear. Easily resolve this error by installing ACF or ACF Pro. 

The CP4WP plug-in will populate the event data fields using the ACF fields present on the See Tickets event posts. This data comes directly from your See Tickets events.

The CP4WP plug-in will be titled “See Tickets” on the list of active plug-ins.

Once activated, your sidebar will populate a custom post type titled “See Tickets Events” and also a CP4WP admin page titled “Client Portal”.

General Settings

Copy/pasting directly from this document can in some cases cause WP-Cron to produce an error. If this occurs, rewrite it by hand in the wp-config file.

See Tickets Credentials

To specify which data the plug-in should access on See Tickets and populate on your website, fill in the API credentials on the Client Portal page in the See Tickets Credentials section.

You are required to add:

• API Key
• API Secret
• Client ID

To access your See Tickets Credentials, go to your client dashboard in See Tickets Manage. Under Market on the left side navigation, you will find API Credentials for Events Integration. From there you will copy your Client ID, API Key, and API Secret to paste into the Client Portal page.

"Events" and "Inventory" need to be selected
when creating API credentials for the WP Plugin.

API Credentials for Events on your Client Dashboard

If you have multiple client accounts populating to your website, you will need to repeat this process on each client account that you want populated on your website.

Hit Save Settings and Run Event Feed on either the top or bottom of the Client Portal page. Imported events will now populate in the custom post type: See Tickets Events.

Scheduled Import

Choose to enable a scheduled import of event data (recommended) and the interval you would like the event data to be retrieved from your See Tickets client account. We recommend a 1-minute interval, unless you have 100+ events which could have a negative impact on your website loading time.

Additional Resource

The CP4WP plug-in uses the WordPress built in task scheduling system (wp-cron) for running import tasks. By default wp-cron is executed on page loads, and handles tasks according to their defined schedules. Although See Tickets is dedicated to keeping the CP4WP plug-in server resources as low as possible, this method can cause slow page loads when handling a large number of events.

If your hosting provider supports executing scheduled cron tasks on server side, we recommend disabling wp-cron’s default triggering mechanism and configuring your server to run wp-cron tasks periodically. To do so, add this line to your wp-config.php file in your WordPress install.

define(‘DISABLE_WP_CRON’, true);

Configure your server to run wp-cron.php as often as possible. The preference is for every 1 minute so your website is always displaying the most up to date content if edited after the initial publish date/time. 

Fields to exclude from updating

By enabling the exclusion of fields from updating, the plug-in will import the See Tickets event as-is when published on See Tickets. After the initial import, any fields excluded from updating will not be updated on your website. All others will continue to update at the interval selected for the setting Schedule Interval: 1 minute or 15 minutes. This is often used for ticket status which imports the status of Buy Tickets, Not Available, or Box Office Only.

Default status for imported events

Instead of publishing events to your website upon retrieval from See Tickets, you can choose to Draft the new events. This is particularly helpful if you desire to customize the event details for your website instead of using the event data from See Tickets.

Import event images to Media Library

To relieve data storage on your website, we recommend disabling the import of event images to the Media Library. If you disable this feature, you will not be able to view the event image as a featured image on the See Tickets Events posts on your website.

Set default image for events

In the case that an event image has not been decided in the See Tickets events build, choose to add a custom default image for event listings. Typically, this is your logo. The default image will appear on all events that do not have an event image importing from the See Tickets event.

Additional Resource

Your event images imported from See Tickets are square. Creating a square image for your default image would be a best practice.

Social sharing icons

Included in the event cards are icons for sharing an event directly to Facebook and Twitter. In the Client Portal, select whether the icons display as icons only or in a filled circle. Use the color picker to set a filled color circle.

Custom Labels

Customize how the labels appear for supporting talent, door time, and show time in the event card. If the labels are not necessary for the site, they can be hidden with a checkbox.

Most often supporting talent adds a custom label of “with” or door time to read “Doors:” on the event card.

All button statuses read

The plugin allows you to control what all button statuses read for all events imported onto your site. This will override all new, previous, and future events imported into your site. This also includes events in the event slider, “Just announced” section, filtered events, and search results.

Show repeating events in admin

For multi-day events, you can enable the plug-in to create duplicate posts for all days of the event. All duplicate events will share the same See Tickets ticket link for the multi-day event. This is a good option if you want to show the same event on the calendar for all days that the event is taking place, instead of a single event card with the date range listed.

Link event title and image

Select whether all events link directly to the See Tickets event page or if they link to single event pages on your website. There are fields available on the See Tickets Events posts pages in the backend of your site that will be displayed on the single WordPress event page. Single event pages include all event card data, with the addition of a video embed.

Order of event card elements

Drag and drop to arrange elements on your event cards. To rearrange, hover over the three bars on the field you’d like to move and click to select it. Drag the box to the location desired, and release the cursor to drop it. 

Ticket Status

Your ticket status will be the text that is displayed inside the event card button. The default statuses are:

• Buy Tickets (Tickets available for sale online)
• Sold Out (No tickets remaining for all ticket types)
• Not Available (General catchall when tickets aren’t available)
• Box Office Only (Tickets are only available in the Box Office)
• Hidden Only (Only hidden ticket types are available)
• Coming Soon (Tickets are not on-sale yet, either using an event on-sale timer or if all ticket timers are set.)

Ticket Status Logic

The ticket button displays button text based on the following rules, in the following order:

1. If the off-sale time is met, the button will display Event Passed.
2. If you are using the All button statuses read option under General Settings, the button will display the defined text.
3. If any user defined criteria is met for displaying event as past event, the button will display Event Passed.
4. As long as none of the above is met, the button will display the actual ticket status text.

Customizing Ticket Statuses in ACF

The plugin uses a JSON file to store and display the Advanced Custom Fields labels for ticket button status. The plugin gets these ticket (event) status assignments from the Manage admin. However, ACF allows customization of these labels on your site. For example, you can update all Not Available statuses to read Sold Out. This does not affect the messaging on the See Tickets event page.

To adjust the ticket button statuses:

1. Navigate to ACF in the left sidebar of Wordpress
2. Click on See Tickets Event fields to open the fields inside the group
3. Scroll down to the Ticket Status field
4. Click Edit to open
5. On the panel that slides down, scroll to Choices
6. Save the changes using the Save button in the top right corner on the page

Default Choices	Adjusted Choices

When updating the CP4WP plugin version to a newer version, the ACF fields will need to be interacted with to reset the customizations. This is due to how the plugin interacts with, and stores data inside, the database.

To make the previous customizations appear again, it is very simple. Retyping the Ticket Status text is not necessary. The ACF will only need a quick resave of the fields in order to reset the customized labels.

1. Navigate to ACF on the left sidebar
2. Go to See Tickets Event fields
3. Click Edit to open
4. Save without doing anything!

This will reset the customized ticket button status labels site-wide. The customized labels will now be used by the site instead of the actual status of the event.

See Tickets Events Posts Types

Events being imported from the Client Portal for Wordpress plugin will be populated in the See Tickets Events posts. Inside each post type you will have the ability to change the button status (from Get Tickets to Sold Out, for example), add a video on the single post page, or update any of the event information.

To make sure your event details options stay customized, and not updated on each import according to the See Tickets-build event, you will need to go to the Client Portal page and exclude fields from updating. This exclusion customization will affect all events and therefore will not update once the initial import process has taken place.

Single Post Page

Selecting See Tickets event page on the Client Portal page will send users to the White Label when they click a ticket button on your website.

The pages can also be set to open into new tabs, if needed. Check or uncheck that box to use the feature. 

To edit the Single Event Post Page for a specific event, first find the event in the See Tickets Events posts. Click the event name to edit the event post page. 

Click Update in the top right corner of the post to save any changes. Visit the single event post page to review the layout. By default, the video content appears directly below the event card.

Shortcodes

Configure all event listings, calendar settings, and customizations on the Client Portal page.

To display events with a shortcode on a page of the site, highlight and copy the shortcode text and paste it into a page editor. This works seamlessly with the WordPress Block Editor. For Classic Editor and HTML code:

<?php echo do_shortcode( "[your_shortcode]" ); ?>

Event Calendar

This shortcode will show a calendar of events from your See Tickets account. Copy the shortcode text from the Client Portal page and paste the copied shortcode into the editor of the page to display a calendar on the front end of the website.

• Customize whether Sunday or Monday is a choice for the start of the week.
• Hide months that have no events in them.
• If you have the same event with an early and a late show, there is an option to hide the second instance to remove cluttered dates.
• Don’t want a long page view? Opt to only show a few months ahead. On mobile, the calendar will be replaced with the event list view for ease of use.

Event Slider

The event slider shortcode will show the next 1-10 upcoming events, depending on selection amount, from the See Tickets Manage account data, in chronological order. 

Select with or without text, and with arrows on the slider for navigating between the event or circles on the bottom of the slide. Choose how many events you’d like to display (up to 5) and if you would like the events to auto-slide on the page.

Event List View: List or Alternate

This shortcode will show the chosen number of upcoming events from your See Tickets account, in chronological order. The layout will be one full-width card per row, stacked in a single column. You can choose to use an alternating view, which will show the event image and details aligned to the left and right in alternating order.

Event List View: Grid

This shortcode will show the chosen number of upcoming events from your See Tickets account, in chronological order. The layout will be a grid with the number of column options from 2-4. You will select the number of columns, the number of visible events, and whether you would like pagination or a “Load More” button to add events to the page. The “Load More” button will cascade events down the page on click.

Event Search

This is a dual shortcode to use for searching events on a website, and placing the results in a specific area. Set the parameters, and the Shortcode will update accordingly. Parameters include genre, event title, location, supporting talent and headliners. After selecting search parameters, copy the search shortcode text and place it on a page, in a widget, or in a template file. Choose your Material card design type for the search results event cards.

If adding the search shortcode to a single page, such as the homepage, don’t forget to add the search results shortcode along with it.

If adding the search shortcode to a header, footer, widget, or php theme partial, the Site Theme will need to be modified. Use the do_shortcode method to include the results shortcode in the theme files. This allows the results to appear when the site is searched from any page.

Add the search shortcode to the header or footer file. Modify the theme’s page.php and any other page templates to place the search results shortcode.

Additional Resource

It is possible to use php to call the search with:

do_shortcode(‘[eventsearch fields=’event_title’])

It is also possible for this Shortcode to be placed in a widget for the header, sidebar, or another widgetized location in a theme.

Just Announced Events

This shortcode will show 1-10 of the most recently announced events from your See Tickets account data. Choose the amount of events shown in the Just Announced settings section. In order for Just Announced to properly display in the order of announced date and time, the events on See Tickets must have a Public Announce Date/Time. This is done either in your event build or in the Event Settings on your Event Dashboard and will populate in the Publish Date field on your website.

Additional Resource

If you have 5 events chosen to display on the Just Announced settings section, and only 2 with a Public Announce Date/Time on See Tickets, the plug-in logic considers an empty value for publish date to be the most recent and will list these dates first in your Just Announced section.

Past Events

If you want to display events you have had in the past with the plug-in’s ability to auto-populate, use the shortcode available to do so. Past events will display all lapsed events after the plug-in has been activated. Past events will only show when the shortcode for past events is added to the page, with options of how many events to show on the page and what pushes them to the event passed status.

Event Filtered View: Categories and Tags

This shortcode will show events with a specific category or specific tag. This can also be set up to display multiple categories or tags. Copy the shortcode and paste into the page you want the list view on. 

Category Filter

Categories shown on the Client Portal page are imported from your WordPress See Tickets Events posts > Categories. 

Tag Filter

Tags are imported with your See Tickets events. Tags are added and removed during the See Tickets event creation process and can be selected and deselected on the Client Portal page. You can add more than one shortcode with tags specified for each instance.

Color Selection

In the Color Selection area, there are 5 boxes with color drop downs. This is where colors are set for elements of your event cards. 

Choose:

• Button background color: This is the ticket button background color.
• Button text color: This is the color of the text on the button.
• Button text hover color: This is the color of the text when the cursor is hovering over the button.
• Event listing background color: This is for the background of the event card itself.
• Text color: This is the color of the text on the card itself. 

Set the colors by clicking the Save and Run Event Feed button. Use the reset button if you need to start over selecting new colors.

Custom CSS

At the bottom of the page is a text box for custom CSS. Write new styles using the classes in the HTML to further customize the look of your event cards, calendar, search and event slider.