What’s new in Tickera version 3.4.6.7?
What better way to start a new year than by releasing an update? And that's exactly what we have done! New update of Tickera core plugin has been released on 3rd of January 2020 and brings quite a bit of new stuff. Some of these features were the ones that you, our customers, have been asking us to integrate for a while now. As we're always listening to our customers, we heard you this time as well and here's what we done.
Duplicate ticket template elements
This feature was one of the most demanded ones. And we're not surprised with that. So far, you would need to create each ticket template from scratch which, if you want to keep consistency between ticket templates for different tickets on your website and only want to change some small detail on each ticket template, it was quite challenging and often tedious to do from the beginning each time. But we heard you and understood your needs so there you have it now. Once you install this latest update of Tickera, when you navigate to Ticket Templates area of Tickera, you will notice that in the table of all the available ticket templates, there is a Duplicate option which, if clicked, will duplicate the ticket template, preserving the layout of the original one.
Attendee name placeholder in emails
It's all about the small things.... We understand that it is important to you to add that "personal touch" when contacting customers who purchased tickets on your website. And nothing beats the personal moment when an email starts with "Hi there Jonathan, we've got the ticket for you!" So far, this privilege was reserved for ticket buyers only but from this version of Tickera, you can use FIRST_NAME and LAST_NAME placeholders in the content of the email that is sent to the attendees as well. So, if someone purchases tickets for all their friends and enters all of their names and emails, they will all receive their ticket download links and the content of the email can now contain their names as well.
A couple of new ticket template elements
As much as we have tried to include any information possible to include on the tickets themselves, it always happened that you need that one extra bit of information on your ticket that doesn't have its element for the ticket template. Of course, we're always willing to help and so far we have crafted numerous of custom add-ons for adding custom ticket template elements based on your requests (just check the list in our solutions page in the Ticket template modifications area and you'll get the idea). However, certain things were asked more than the others and by far the two elements most commonly demanded were the date of purchase and event category. So, without asking too much questions, we have now simply included these two elements in our ticket template builder so that you can now seamlessly include this information to your ticket templates.
Prevent accidental deletion of the ticket types
To tell you the truth, we did this one for the sake of our support team. And here's why; prior to this version of Tickera, it was possible to delete the ticket types for the active events without too much hassle: simply click Delete and you're done. However, if you did this (and believe me, lots of you did), all purchased tickets associated with the deleted ticket types would become automatically ineligible for the check-in.
It happened way too often that our customers contacted us, panicking "What do I do now??? HELP!"
Add to that the fact that most events happen over the weekends and, you know, we're also humans and like to rest every now and then but when our customers are panicking, we simply need to help them. Yes, of course, in vast majority of these cases we were able to help but this required quite deep digging through the database on the website of our customer, figuring out IDs, associations and whatnot... all in all it was very frustrating process for both our customers and us. So, we had to do something about this and we figured it would be the best to let the customer know the result of their actions when they attempt to delete a ticket type that customers have purchased on their website. From this version of Tickera, if you try and hit Trash button for certain ticket type, it will check whether there are ticket instances associated with this ticket type and if there are, a popup will appear with this text: Are you sure you want to delete this ticket type? You have 245 tickets sold for some of the selected ticket types
This is the point where a red flag should appear in your head with the words "Uh-oh... maybe I shouldn't do this".
Improvement of Braintree payment gateway
Braintree announced that they will require SCA/PSD2 compliance by the end of 2020. So, we figured, why not do it early and have a whole year in front of us to test it thoroughly and make sure everything works like it should. But, it turned out that the initial test went well so we have included updated version of Braintree payment gateway integration for Tickera which is now fully SCA/PSD2 compliant and supports 3DS2 checkout. And based on the feedback from our customers (or lack thereof) it appears we did it well.
General maintenance
Of course, new features are always welcome but are only part of the story. Another part of the story is "under the hood" and are things that are not visible to you but are responsible for making Tickera work as smooth as possible. We're actively and carefully maintaining the code of Tickera and this update is no exception as several minor bugs were ironed out. Of course, "bugless" software is a thing of myths so we won't ever tell you that we can guarantee that Tickera does not have any bugs. But what we can do is to promise that we will always do anything we can to hunt down and squash any bugs we find in our code and we'll enjoy every moment doing that.