Hey @juliepayne76,
I will be glad to get you on track here. First, I would like to apologize for a late response. We have been working on our recent huge update, and as as result questions on the forums have gone unanswered for a few days. My apologies.
Moving on, lets start with tags and categories. Even though tags and categories are currently assignable to events, as you seem to figured out, assigning a category or tag does not make the event show on that respective category or tag pages. For the moment, the categories and tags are meant solely as admin side classifications. This will change within a few updates though. One of the things that is next on our list to overhaul, are the options available for displaying your events on the frontend of the site. Currently, events are only accessible via the calendar view of the site.
During the installation process of OpenTickets, a ‘page’ was created, called ‘Event Calendar’. By default, we try to put this page at the location https://example.com/calendar/. At the moment, any end user that comes to your site should be directed to that calendar page, so that they can see the up coming events. An alternative, currently, would be to embed direct links to specific event showings, on a page that is visible to all users (like the home page, or a new page called ‘my-events’ or something like that). The WordPress wysiwyg has a feature that allows you to directly link to any post (or event, or really any custom post type), by highlighting the text you want to link, clicking the ‘link’ icon (looks like a segment of ‘chain’), and then clicking the ‘Or link to existing content’ in the bottom left of the box that pops up.
Next, it seems like there may be some confusion on the event date and times. You said that when you choose the same ‘event area’ and ‘venue’ as a previous event, that the event date for the new event defaults to the same date as the previous event; however, by the time you are allowed to choose the ‘event area’ and the ‘venue’, the date of the event has already been selected, and is locked in, making it unchangeable without removing the occurrence and re-adding it. The only thing I can think is that possibly happening here, is that the ‘publish date’ and the ‘event date’ are being confused.
When you are selecting the ‘event area’ and ‘venue’, there is a date that is changeable with those options, but that date is the ‘publish date’ of the ‘showing’ (aka child event). This would be akin to the ‘publish date’ on a regular post on your blog, which could be used to prevent the event from being shown on the site until the future date you set here has passed, much like a ‘scheduled’ blog post. The actual event date is a completely separate idea, which represents the starting time of an event, and is chosen before you have the option to edit the venue and event area. Here is a screenshot that hopefully explains the interface a little better.
Moving along, you had a question about price reuse, and pricing assignment to an event area. In OpenTickets Community Edition (OTCE) itself, you can only have one price assigned to a given event area, as you pointed out. Basically, that means that if you need to have different priced ‘sporting events’ or ‘pop concerts’ at the same venue and event area, then, with OTCE alone, you would have to create one venue (representing the actually building or structure that holds the event) with many event areas (representing the different types of events that could be held there), each with their own pricing structure for their respective events.
Thus, taking a basketball stadium as an example, you may have basketball games there, but you may also have a rock concert or a Disney ice-skating show their, depending on the time of year, each having their own prices. What you would want to do is create a ‘venue’ called ‘such and such basketball stadium’. Then inside that venue you would create multiple ‘event areas’, on for each type of event — ‘home basketball game night’, ‘super awesome rock concert night’, and ‘disney on ice night’ — each of which could be assigned their own pricing, and each of which could have their own ticket images.
There is another option though. Sometimes, creating a slue of different event areas does not make sense or is inconvenient. Other times, you may have two or more pricing levels, like: adult, child, student and senior. You may want to use charge a different set of prices depending on the time of day, like matinee and nightly showings, etc… All of these situations can be solved with one of our premium extensions, called General Admission Multi-Price (or GAMP). With GAMP, you can easily reuse those same venues and event areas, and assign them multiple pricing structures, each of which could be used for those different types of events, sports game, concerts and shows. Sounds like this may be something you need, based on how you are posing the question.
Hopefully you find this helpful. As before, if not, hit me back with some more info on the specific problem, and I will try to put together a more accurate and targeted answer for you.
Loushou
