Documentation

A simple guide to installing and using BoxOffice WP.

Plugin installation

Option 1: Using the WordPress dashboard

  1. Download the BoxOffice WP plugin ZIP file.
  2. Log in to your WordPress website as an Administrator.
  3. In the left-hand menu, click on “Plugins”.
  4. Under “Plugins”, click the “Add New” sub menu.
  5. Click the “Upload plugin” button.
  6. Select the BoxOffice WP plugin ZIP file and click “Install now”.
  7. After installation, you will find a menu item “BoxOffice WP”, click this to configure the plugin.

Option 2: Using FTP

  1. Download the BoxOffice WP plugin ZIP file.
  2. Upload ‘box-office-wp’ to the ‘/wp-content/plugins/’ directory.
  3. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.
  4. After installation, you will find a menu item “BoxOffice WP”, click this to configure the plugin.

Plugin user guide

Page and URL settings

The following pages will get created upon plugin install:

  • Basket
  • Checkout
  • Event Details
  • Event List
  • My Account

You can change the page slugs as you would any other WordPress page, but these need to be kept in sync with the page slugs listed in the plugin settings, “Page and URL settings” tab. You can also change the name of these pages as you would any other WordPress page. The only page name which must be kept in sync with plugin settings is the “Event Details” page name.

Every time you change page slugs and page names, we recommend that you re-save your permalinks (Settings > Permalinks > Save changes), and clear the plugin cached data via the plugin settings, “Diagnostics info” tab.

The “what’s on” section can be managed via the plugin settings. This setting controls the URL structure that will be used for displaying event details pages, e.g. www.yoursite.com/whats-on/event-name. Again, after changing this setting, please re-save permalinks and clear cached data.

Control the appearance of the event list (Pro version)

You can control the date format used on your event list page – by default the plugin will use “j F Y, H:i”. See this page for more details: https://www.php.net/manual/en/datetime.formats.date.php.

The layout of the event list page is also controlled via the plugin settings. On the “Event list” tab you will see a text box where you can add any of the following tags:

[name]
[description]
[html_description]
[duration]
[image]
[is_on_sale]
[instance_dates]
[thumbnail]
[first_instance_date_time]
[last_instance_date_time]
[more_details]
[book_now]

This will control the information that gets displayed for each event on the event list page, and in what order. Adding a “link” attribute will cause the item to be wrapped in a link to the event details page, e.g.:

[name link]
[description link]

Control the appearance of the event details page (Pro version)

Unlike the event list, the event details page is configured by editing the WordPress Event Details that was created when the plugin was first installed. This page contains a number of blocks for event properties such as “Event Name”, “Event Thumbnail”, “Event Description”, etc. Rearrange/add/remove these as you would any other WordPress block.

Important: You must leave the “Event Instance List” and “Choose Seats iframe” blocks at the bottom of the page for your plugin to work properly (i.e. to let visitors start the booking process).

Custom filters (Pro version)

If your site happens to use custom event attributes, you can add a filter to the event search bar for each custom attribute. For example, assuming your site had a custom attribute of “Type”, you could add “Type;Event type” to the plugin settings. This will display an “Event type” filter. You can add as many custom filters as you like, add one filter per line.

Offer filter (Pro version)

If you change this setting to “true”, the plugin will generate an “Offers” drop-down filter in the event search bar. Enabling this filter has a slight impact on performance, due to the additional API calls required.

Ignoring events by name (Pro version)

You can ignore all events with a particular string of text in the event name using the “Event name ignore string” setting. For example, you might have rehearsal events that all contain the text “- Rehearsal” at the end. Use this setting to prevent such events appearing on the site.