How Do I Accept Reservations or Payment for Events?

Here are instructions for setting up your website to accept reservations and/or payment using the standard features of the Events component that’s installed on your site. Please take a test run and let me know what you think. 

1. Allow reservations through the Events component
This is necessary for free and/or paid reservations. The option to allow reservations for Events can be set both globally and by event specifically. 

Global

• ‘Components > Events > Configuration’, select the 'Reservations' tab
• Here you can specify whether or not the events in your system will generally allow registrations online. If you do not want ANY RSVPs to happen online, then set the 'Global Allow Reservations' to NO. (Your Global setting is probably currently set to NO, if you haven't used this feature before.) If you generally want to allow reservations, set it to YES.

Event-specific
You can set registration permissions also WITHIN each Event, in the 'Registration' tab on the right side.

• ‘Component > Events > Manage Event’ and choose the particular event
• Go into ‘Edit’ and select the 'Registration' tab on the right side of the page
• The options for ‘Allow Reservation’ are: Global (ie, do whatever the Global settings say to do), Yes, or No. So in this case, where your Global permissions do not allow registration, setting a particular event's permissions to Global or No makes no online registration for that event. If you set it to Yes, online registration/payment will be allowed ONLY for that single event.

2. Configure for payments through Paypal.

• Create a Paypal account. If you already have one, get the email address of that account.
• Go to the particular Event for which you’d like to accept payment.
• In the right column, select the ‘Fees’ tab.
• Paste the email address you use for your Paypal account. Create price levels as you wish.
• If you want to restrict a certain price level to members, or a pre-defined list of emails, you can do so by setting the ‘Member List’ to Global Member List or Email List Below. You would enter the emails for your Global Member List in the ‘Events Configuration’. You would enter Email List Below in the event-specific list in the box you see right there.
• Go to ‘Reservations’ tab. Make sure ‘Allow Reservations’ is set to YES (or Global).
• Apply changes.
• Go to ‘Components > Events > Configuration >> ‘Paypal’ tab. Change the settings to ‘Live Paypal’. (Sandbox is a testing mode.)
• Additionally, 'Member Levels' must be set to 'Yes' in order to allow payment.

3. Now, go to this event on the front-end of your site. 
You should see a new section on the event view that allows users to enter information to send their RSVP (and eventually make payment). If you’d like to see more fields in that RSVP form…

• Go to 'Events > Configuration >> Reservations' tab
• Check the boxes next the fields that are available for your RSVP forms. You can also select which of those fields is *required*.

4. What happens when someone RSVPs to an event? 

• After hitting submit, the user will see a confirmation message in that RSVP tab on the front end.
• If your event required payment, this confirmation message will contain a hyperlink to the Paypal payment page, where they will enter their payment information. Customers do not have to have a Paypal account; they will also be able to just enter their credit card info without an account.
• If your event required payment, a new browser window from Paypal should also open (but that depends on the popup settings of the user, and we’re currently having some trouble with that in Internet Explorer). In any event, they will see a hyperlinked message that will direct them to Paypal.
• The user should also receive an email confirmation with details of the event
• You can view reservations by going to any one of your Events; the ‘Reservations’ field is the second from the bottom in the back-end event view
• You will see here who has RSVPd, who has paid, etc.
• You can also create RSVPs from the back-end in that box by hitting the 'Add' button.

We are currently working to improve the export function so that you can create a spreadsheet with all the RSVP information. As it works now, we’ll have to create a system for you to ‘log-in’ to the front of your event and export from there. It’s not too difficult, but you'll have to contact the Support department to set that up.