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Running WP Event Ticketing with Thesis

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UPDATED 12/1/2010: Version 1.1.2 was released this evening and fixes the conflict with Thesis. Instead of editing the files manually, you can download the latest version instead.

We’ve had a few reports of our plugin WP Event Ticketing not displaying the Ticketing menu on the admin dashboard. The common denominator for the reports was that they were all using the Thesis theme.

After some troubleshooting through the code, I found a conflict that I believe to be a bug in the way WordPress handles the addition of new navigational menu items. I’ve reported the conflict to the WordPress development team, but it’s not something that will likely be fixed right away. So until then, we’ve come up with a simple workaround. We will include this update in our next release, but until then, here is the workaround.

1. In a text editor, open the file named ticketing.php
2. Find the line that looks like this:

add_menu_page('Tickets', 'Tickets', 'activate_plugins', 'eventticketing', array("eventTicketingSystem", "ticketReporting"), WP_PLUGIN_URL . '/' . plugin_basename(dirname(__FILE__)) . '/images/calendar_full.png',30);

3. Replace that line with the following:

add_menu_page('Tickets', 'Tickets', 'activate_plugins', 'eventticketing', array("eventTicketingSystem", "ticketReporting"), WP_PLUGIN_URL . '/' . plugin_basename(dirname(__FILE__)) . '/images/calendar_full.png',29);

Once you make this change, “Tickets” should now show up right before the “Thesis” menu item.

As always, if you run in to any issues with the plugin, we urge you to post it to the WP Event Ticketing Support Forum. If you’d like to be informed when we release new software updates, be sure to sign up for the 9seeds Newsletter.

John Hawkins interviewed by Life of the Freelancer

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Back in September I was contacted by Robert Dempsey about doing an interview for a new project he was working on. The project is a site called Life of the Freelancer where he’s providing excellent information, interviews and resources for people who are already or are considering leaving corporate America and working as freelance.

Since I work from home, every day life happens all around me all day long. About 5 minutes in to the video, you’ll get to hear my Irish Setter lose his mind when the gardener shows up. After that, things settle down. 🙂

I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to meet Robert in person a few weeks back at WordCamp MSP. He is a tremendously nice guy and is providing excellent information over at LifeOfTheFreelancer. I encourage you to check it out.

As a quick aside, I was jokingly giving Robert grief about the fact that I had recorded the interview with him back in September and as of a few weeks ago it still hadn’t been posted. It was, of course, all in good fun. But you know how they say everything happens for a reason, well this was a perfect example. Listening to the interview this morning turned out to be perfect timing. It was a great reminder of why we set out on this crazy journey that is 9seeds.

Before I go, I’d like to wish you all a very happy Thanksgiving.

– John

New plugin: WP Event Ticketing

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As we were gearing up to organize WordCamp Las Vegas 2010, we wanted to move the management of the ticket ordering process in-house. One of the main reasons being we didn’t want to pay a third party site to handle the ticket sales for the event since they charge per ticket. Sure, we could have passed the cost on to the ticket buyer, but that’s just not how we roll! Instead, we got to work building a WordPress plugin; WP Event Ticketing.

If you are the impatient type, you can download WP Event Ticketing and try it out, or read on for a list of features and screenshots.

WP Event Ticketing Features

  • Real-time payments via Papal
  • Multiple ticket types. (For example, basic ticket includes entry only, gold ticket includes entry plus a shirt.)
  • Ticket packages that can include multiple tickets. (Useful for offering registration to sponsors.)
  • Set your event’s maximum attendance
  • Choose what data you want to collect from attendees
  • Limit quantity of each type of ticket packages to sell
  • Display/hide # of tickets remaining on registration page
  • Create single or multiple use coupons
  • Create flat-rate or percentage based coupons
  • Send email notification to all registered attendees
  • Export attendee list to CSV
  • Manually create a ticket for an attendee
  • Ticket and revenue reporting
  • Summary reports show counts by data collected. (for example, display a list of t-shirt sizes and how many of each you need to order)

Screenshots

Looking for more features?
We are currently hard at work on Event Ticketing Pro. We have a ton of features planned for the pro version! You aren’t going to want to miss it. Sign up for our newsletter to be notified when the pro version is released.

Drupal to WordPress migration

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Updated: 8/19/2013 – 9seeds does not offer Drupal to WordPress conversion as a stand-alone service. If you need to convert from one CMS to another, we suggest you check out https://9seeds.com/cms2cms

A client came to us this week with a problem; he had a Drupal site with over 1000 articles that he wanted to convert to WordPress. So we headed to Google for some help. There are several tutorials out there on how to migrate Drupal content to a WordPress site, but many of them are really outdated. After kicking the tires on a few, this post by Mike Smullin seemed to be the best jumping off point.

Mike is right up front in his instructions with the fact that you’ll need to do a bit of tweaking to his set of instructions to get it to work for your setup. After a few failed attempts, we came up with an updated set of instructions. We’ve included the updated version along with notes about changes made.

These instructions are a set of SQL statements. It assumes you have a database named WordPress using ‘wp_’ as the prefix and another database named Drupal.

This should go without saying, but I’ll say it anyway; do not move forward without backing up your databases FIRST!

Clear all existing WordPress content

TRUNCATE TABLE wordpress.wp_comments;
TRUNCATE TABLE wordpress.wp_links;
TRUNCATE TABLE wordpress.wp_postmeta;
TRUNCATE TABLE wordpress.wp_posts;
TRUNCATE TABLE wordpress.wp_term_relationships;
TRUNCATE TABLE wordpress.wp_term_taxonomy;
TRUNCATE TABLE wordpress.wp_terms;

Create Categories

INSERT INTO wordpress.wp_terms (term_id, `name`, slug, term_group)
SELECT
 d.tid, d.name, REPLACE(LOWER(d.name), ' ', '_'), 0
FROM drupal.term_data d
INNER JOIN drupal.term_hierarchy h
 USING(tid);

Add Taxonomies

INSERT INTO wordpress.wp_term_taxonomy (term_id, taxonomy, description, parent)
SELECT
 d.tid `term_id`,
 'category' `taxonomy`,
 d.description `description`,
 h.parent `parent`
FROM drupal.term_data d
INNER JOIN drupal.term_hierarchy h
 USING(tid);

Import posts/pages
We added ‘article’ to the array on the last line to solve an issue with the way Drupal had categorized the posts.

INSERT INTO wordpress.wp_posts (id, post_date, post_content, post_title, post_excerpt, post_name, post_modified, post_type, `post_status`)
SELECT DISTINCT
 n.nid `id`,
 FROM_UNIXTIME(n.created) `post_date`,
 r.body `post_content`,
 n.title `post_title`,
 r.teaser `post_excerpt`,
 IF(SUBSTR(a.dst, 11, 1) = '/', SUBSTR(a.dst, 12), a.dst) `post_name`,
 FROM_UNIXTIME(n.changed) `post_modified`,
 n.type `post_type`,
 IF(n.status = 1, 'publish', 'private') `post_status`
FROM drupal.node n
INNER JOIN drupal.node_revisions r
 USING(vid)
LEFT OUTER JOIN drupal.url_alias a
 ON a.src = CONCAT('node/', n.nid)
WHERE n.type IN ('post', 'page', 'article');

Turn articles in to posts
This will turn the ‘articles’ from the previous step in to ‘posts’ in WordPress.

update wordpress.wp_posts set post_type='post' where post_type='article';

Add post to category relationships

INSERT INTO wordpress.wp_term_relationships (object_id, term_taxonomy_id)
SELECT nid, tid FROM drupal.term_node;

Update category count

UPDATE wordpress.wp_term_taxonomy tt
SET `count` = (
 SELECT COUNT(tr.object_id)
 FROM wordpress.wp_term_relationships tr
 WHERE tr.term_taxonomy_id = tt.term_taxonomy_id);

Import comments

INSERT INTO wordpress.wp_comments (comment_post_ID, comment_date, comment_content, comment_parent, comment_author, comment_author_email, comment_author_url, comment_approved)
SELECT nid, FROM_UNIXTIME(timestamp), comment, thread, name, mail, homepage, status FROM drupal.comments;

Update comment counts
After fighting with the original syntax, I added the ‘use wordpress’ step to get around it.

use wordpress;
UPDATE `wp_posts` SET `comment_count` = (SELECT COUNT(`comment_post_id`) FROM `wp_comments` WHERE `wp_posts`.`id` = `wp_comments`.`comment_post_id`);

Fix breaks in post content

UPDATE wordpress.wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, '', '');

Fix images in post content

UPDATE wordpress.wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, '"/files/', '"/wp-content/uploads/');

If your posts have any images you’ll need to move them from your ./files directory to the ./wp-content/uploads directory. The final step above should take care of fixing any image calls in your pages and posts, but you still may need to manually update them if you are having issues.

Download a copy/paste friendly version of the Drupal to WordPress instructions here.

if you have any questions, leave us a comment below.