Schedopia 1.3.0: sell seats for events, classes and shows
Schedopia 1.3.0 adds seat-mapped event booking to WordPress. Draw a seat map, price the tiers and let customers pick their seats, double-booking guard included.
Schedopia 1.3.0 is out on WordPress.org. It is the biggest release since 1.0, and it adds a second thing the plugin can book: a seat at a dated event, alongside a time with a person.
Two kinds of booking
Until now, Schedopia booked people into time. A customer picks a service and a staff member, and the form finds a slot that fits.
Plenty of businesses sell something else: a place at a dated session. A yoga class has twelve mats. A cookery workshop has eight benches. A community theater has 120 seats, and the ones at the front cost more. Those businesses were getting by with a ticketing service that took a cut of every ticket, or a second plugin, or a paper chart on the wall.
1.3.0 adds that second kind of booking. Same plugin, same customer list, same emails.
What’s new in 1.3.0
Venues and halls
Model your space as a venue with one or more halls. Each hall has its own seat layout.
A visual seat planner
Draw rows and seats in the admin, or generate them in bulk and adjust by hand. Leave gaps for aisles. The map you draw is the map customers see.
Tiers and per-seat prices
Group seats into tiers such as VIP, Standard and Balcony, each with its own color and price. If one seat needs a different price, override it on that seat alone.
Events with live availability
Create a dated event in a hall. The event list shows date, venue, hall, duration, a live seats-left count and a “from” price.
Multi-hall events
Open a second hall for an event when the first fills up. Customers switch between halls on the map.
The same double-booking guard
A seat can never be reserved twice for the same event. Reservations are validated against seats already taken inside a database transaction, the same protection appointment slots already have.
A setup wizard that asks
The setup wizard now asks whether you take appointments or sell seats, and sets up the admin to match. You can run both from Settings.
A walkthrough: from an empty hall to a sold seat
Here is the whole thing, end to end, for a 120-seat community theater. It takes about fifteen minutes the first time.
1. Describe the venue
Under Schedopia → Venues & Seats, add a venue (the building) and a hall (the room people sit in). A venue can hold several halls, and each hall keeps its own layout, so a center with a main hall and a studio sets both up once and reuses them for every event.
2. Draw the seat map
Open the hall and choose Edit seat map. Set the number of rows and seats per row, add aisles where the gaps are, and generate the grid. Seats are labeled like a theater, A1 to A12, B1 to B12, and so on. If your room numbers right to left from the stage, or starts counting at a number other than 1, or needs a prefix such as VIP-A1, the numbering controls match it. A short front row can start at its own number. A broken seat or a restricted view is switched off once and shows as unavailable everywhere.
3. Price the tiers
Seat categories are shared across halls: create VIP, Standard and Balcony once, each with a color and a price, then paint them onto seats in the planner. A seat with no category costs whatever you give it directly. A seat with a category inherits its price unless you override that one seat, which is how front-row center ends up dearer than the rest of its row. Changing a tier’s price affects future bookings only; existing reservations keep the total they were made at.
4. Create the event
Select the hall and choose Add event. Give it a name, a start and end time, an optional description and a cover image from your media library. Check more than one hall if the show opens two rooms. The event has no price or capacity of its own: both come from its seats, so the events list works out the cheapest bookable seat and the seats-left count on its own.
5. Put the form on a page
Add [schedopia_booking mode="event"] to a page. If your business mode is events only, the plain [schedopia_booking] shortcode shows the seat flow already. From there the customer:
- Sees the list of upcoming sessions, each with its date, venue and hall, duration, live seats-left count and a “from” price, and chooses one.
- Lands on the seat map. Tiers are color-coded, taken seats are grayed out, and a booking summary totals what they have picked, up to eight seats in one booking.
- Enters a name, email and phone, and confirms.
Pay on arrival, the confirmation email with calendar buttons, and the self-service cancellation link all work the same way they do for appointments. Canceling a reservation, from the admin or from the email link, frees the seats immediately.
6. Take a booking over the phone
Someone rings up? In Bookings, choose New booking, switch to Seat reservation, pick the event, tap the seats on the same map customers use, choose the customer and save. It sits in the list with the event name and seat count, and opens as a reservation rather than an appointment.
What happens when two people want the last seat
This is the question every venue asks first, so here is the mechanism. When a customer confirms, Schedopia opens a database transaction, re-reads which seats are already reserved for that event, and only then writes the reservation. If a second confirmation for the same seat arrives in the same moment, it waits for the first to finish, sees the seat is gone, and tells that customer the seat is no longer available before anything is saved. The check is in the database, not in the browser, so a slow connection or a stale page cannot slip through. Appointments have used the same guard since 1.0; seats reuse it.
Rescheduling and canceling an event
Change an event’s start or end time and every active reservation follows: the bookings take the new time and their reminder emails are re-armed, so customers are reminded of the new time and not the old one. An event with reservations cannot be deleted; cancel its bookings first, and customers get their cancellation email.
What hasn’t changed
Everything that made 1.2 worth installing is still here and still free: staff availability and buffers, add-ons, the dashboard, CSV export, reminders, self-cancellation, calendar feeds, spam protection, the REST API. Events are an addition, not a pivot.
Upgrading to 1.3.0
Update from the Plugins screen as usual. New tables for venues, halls, seats and events are created automatically. If you only take appointments, nothing changes for you; events mode stays off until you switch it on in Settings.
Read the events documentation to get started, and tell us what you sell seats for. It shapes what we build next.
Who this is for
Small theaters and event spaces with a drawn map and tiers priced differently. Cinemas and screening rooms that run the same hall many times a week. Cookery and craft workshops with one bench per seat, who want to sell exactly as many places as the room holds. Community centers with several halls hosting different sessions on the same evening. Yoga and fitness studios with a fixed number of mats per class, where a live seats-left count answers “is there space on Saturday?” before anyone emails. If you sell places rather than time, this release is for you. If you sell both, run both modes from the same install.
Quick answers
Can I run appointments and events on the same site?
Yes. Both modes share one plugin, one customer list and one set of emails. Put the appointment form on one page and [schedopia_booking mode="event"] on another.
Does Schedopia prevent double-booked seats?
Yes. When a customer confirms, the reservation is checked against seats already taken inside a database transaction, so the same seat cannot be sold twice for one event.
Will upgrading change anything for appointment-only sites?
No. The new tables are created automatically and events mode stays off until you enable it in Settings.
