Help! Need plugin for fitness class registration

[Erin Weber]

WPGR Gurus...

I need help! My WP knowledge ... enough to be dangerous. I am a professor using WP with my senior students to create their online portfolios. Now, I'm helping a friend with her fitness studio website. Her class registration sucks. Well, there are a bunch of issues with her site but that's beside the point. Here's what she wants to do... easy registration for individual classes (that are recurring each week for a specific span of time). Users need to register with their name (currently, users actually login to the WP site then register...pain in the butt) to reserve a bike. The free plugins are pretty limited. We are currently using the Events Manager plugin. The issue is the login. Ideally, it would be awesome to use something like https://www.mindbodyonline.com/fitness; however, at $75/mo that is not in her budget. So I have a few questions and I would greatly appreciate your thoughts and advice so we can get this working for her:

1. Is there are better plug-in than Events Manager to create recurring events and allow easy registration without a complicated login?
2. If not, is it worth paying the $75 to upgrade to Events Manager Pro for additional functionality and support?

I really look forward to your input on this issue!!

Kindly,

Erin Weber

[Chad Warner]

Erin, I haven't used Events Manager, so I'm not familiar with its capabilities. Here are some options for recurring events:

• Event Espresso with Recurring Events addon (requires an Event Espresso license) (I've used the $90 Personal License, but not the Recurring Events addon)
  
• Events Calendar Pro: ($65+; I've used the free version, which doesn't have recurring events)
  
• All-in-One Event Calendar (free; I haven't used this)
  

Chad Warner | OptimWise | Websites that Empower Small Businesses | http://optimwise.com

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[Brian Richards]

Things get really complicated the moment recurrence become a hard requirement. If your friend is already pretty entrenched with Events Manager, upgrading to Pro seems like a good choice to me.

If the only requirement is "Easily register for a class", and your friend doesn't strictly need to show these classes on a calendar nor make them recurring, perhaps a better solution is an eCommerce plugin, such as WooCommerce or iThemes Exchange. With something like this she could create a new product for each class that is available for registration, and even use the inventory tracking to limit registration to a specific number of people. In the product title and description she could give the date range or specific dates and times for each meeting time for that particular class.

I would encourage her to evaluate how much she is earning per class, and how much time it currently costs her to setup the registration for each class on her website – perhaps even estimate how many students are lost due to website complications. This exercise could help frame how valuable a paid solution would be here, even if it has a recurring fee. 

Grace and Peace,
Brian Richards

On Thu, Jan 2, 2014 at 10:00 AM, Erin Weber <profer...@gmail.com> wrote:

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[Erin Weber]

Chad and Brian - THANK YOU! I appreciate your insight more than words can express!!!

I was just looking into the All-in-One Events Calendar, which looks like a good option. For the full functionality she wants, she'll need to either purchase a plug-in or go with a SaaS option. Frankly, I thing an SaaS option is an excellent option; she just needs to commit to the financial side. How long can she go with sapping her free resources (friends with limited knowledge) to do what she needs?

I also looked into ClassDex, which requires an additional e-commerce plug-in, to get the functionality she wants. However, there is more extras with that option that she doesn't need.

Brian, I agree with you that she needs to take some time to evaluate the ROI here

I'll keep you posted on the next step we take. I'm sure I'll be back for more advice and insight.

Kindly,
Erin Weber

[David Damstra]

Here's my pretty simple solution:

A gravity form with a limit on it and make a post for each class.  She'd have to go in and manually duplicate the gravity form and make a new post, but then she should set a time when registration opens too.

[mrpatulski]

We use Birchpress Scheduler Pro to manage appointments of conference rooms and it is very flexible. There is a free version in the WP repository as well as a demo on their site.

http://www.birchpress.com/

[mrpatulski]

Another one to look at is WP Event Organiser with the booking option:

http://wp-event-organiser.com/

Frequent updates, custom post types within a freeium model. Like it.