The InviteOnly Manager allows for an event or specific ticket types to require an invite in order to purchase those tickets.

Configuration

There is a property on each Event and Ticket Type that would enable this behavior. For instance, under the Publishing section of the Event Editor, there is a setting labelled:

“Invite Only Event”. If this is set to “On”, then the event will not normally show up in the eventList of the site.

Implementation

The way it works (for testing/debug) is that the link provided to the user will look like https://site.ticketsocket.com/inviteOnly/78b6773c1c79b5d5a1f696eb97f834a7+

for example where the hash is the last part of the path and is based on the user’s email, first and last name.

There can be more than one event or ticketType invite for each hash (or person). When the person hits the link above, it will go through the inviteOnly plug which will just redirect them to either the eventList Plug (if the user has invites for more than one event) or the eventDetails plug (if there is only one event in their invite list) but with the events and ticketTypes filtered according to the invites for that person. Those 2 plugs will have inviteOnly at the end of the URL followed by the hash. For instance:

https://site.ticketsocket.com/eventList/inviteOnly/78b6773c1c79b5d5a1f696eb97f834a7

When you get to checkout, the URL will look normal, but any ticketTypes for which they do not have access to in their cart will be removed with no message (this should never happen, but just in case it does).

Lastly, the checkout attendee email, firstName and lastName should be readonly and match the invite. That way, you cannot checkout with a different email or name than what was in the invite. Another way of looking at it is that anyone can follow the link, but they can only buy a ticket for the intended invitee.

Features

Events Setting

Each event has a setting under General->Publishing named “Invite Only Event” which can be Yes or No (No by default). Setting this to Yes, hides it from the event list in the UI.

 

 

There is also a Promo Code Required setting on each event and these two settings are mutually exclusive meaning only one can be turned on at a time.

Ticket Type Setting

If you don’t set the “Invite Only Event” to “Yes”, you have the option of setting the event’s Ticket Types to Invite Only under the Ticket Type Advanced settings

 

 

Invite Only Manager

There are three menu options under Manage->Invite Only.

 

The View Invites menu, opens up a listing of the invites with pagination and filtering options. You can filter on the event name, the Ticket Type and a text string which will filter based on the Invite Group, Event Name, Ticket Type Name, Email, Name or Hash (all visible fields). In addition, there is a “Add New Invite” button to manually add an invite to the list. The Hash will be created automatically. There is also an “Export Invites” button on the top right. This button will generate a csv file of the filtered list of invites based on the filters selected.   The Import Invites provides a wizard to walk through the import process to import additional invites. There are three fields on the options page that allows you to set default values for the case that the import file does not contain the field or the case where the field is blank. The import function will automatically figure out the field names if they are named according to the template file that can be downloaded from the first page of the import wizard.   The View InviteOnly Events and Types menu shows a list of all events and ticketTypes that have the “Invite Only” setting set to On.

 

Event Manager and Event Details

The Event Manager will not show events that have their “Invite Only Event” setting set to on unless you follow the inviteOnly link in which case, it will only show you the events for which you have an invite for.

 

The Event Details ticket modal likewise, will not show any ticket types that have the “Invite Only Ticket” set to On unless you follow an InviteOnly link in which case, you will only see the ticket types for which you have an invite.

 

When you follow an InviteOnly link it puts you in InviteOnly Mode and saves a cookie in the browser and it will display a green “Invite Only Mode x” button in the top (myAccountBar) banner. Clicking the “Invite Only Mode x” button will exit invite only mode (and remove the cookie).