Esoteric Drifter

I just answered an interesting question on Aardvark,

Does anyone know of a plugin for wordpress that would allow me to create an event with 2 different registration costs, plus registration for included classes that will automaticlally take a class off the list when it’s full?

My answer: s2Member

Here is the thought: You have seats in a classroom you want to fill (or at a concert venue, party, ext.) and you want to charge people to be in those seats. Lets turn those seats into tickets, so now you have a piece of paper (or in this case some pixels) to represent each seat.

s2Member is a membership plugin, but is also contains some powerful tools for this purpose. In particular it allows you to sell downloads, i guess if you were going to sell an ebook or something.

Still, each member can download a file, after paying you. So in this case they are buying your ticket. Of course, you can put as many tickets on there as you would like, (different downloads) they may even be a simple image file like above. What the file contains, is not as important as the fact that people are paying for it.

Once purchased the tickets (file) can be downloaded by that same WP user as much as they like, and of course, you cannot add a different ticket number to each download without an ungodly amount of work.
Q: So how will you know who belongs in you class?
A: The class roster, the one you make from either WP (a list of users that downloaded your ticket), or from your paypal receipts. That’s easy enough.

Before I forget, this was a two part question. How do you limit over selling your tickets? s2Member also has that covered. You can limit the number of downloads of your tickets by time. i.e. tickets will only be on sale for X number of days and only sell X amount. [s2Member > Download Options]

There are also some added Benefits:
You will have your customers email address, and can follow up with news on the next class, or a ‘how was my class’ survey. And of course, they will know exactly where to refer their friends for the next class.

I may implement this strategy into my friends Halloween party, to sell tickets.

Update: As I’m looking over s2Member plugin, I thought I should note that this post is using some pretty serious “out of the box” thinking. It will take some of that same thinking to actually implement it, and it may be very hard to communicate problems to their support.

In order to keep updated with life we tend to turn to calendars to keep our scheduals in check. Ive decided to take it a step further and post my Google calendar online, so now everyone can take a look at what im doing… I will be allowing certain people access to add/edit events on my calendar. but for the most part it is a view only link.
This calander syncs with my iPhone, so it is what I go by.