Built for how a cafe with weekly live music actually works: a band every Sunday, a pub quiz once a month, tickets that cost a few euros, and bar staff scanning at the door with a phone.

The plugin does six things, and does those six well:

Calendar and ticket sales. Every night is its own page with its own address, so it can be found on its own. Recurring nights are scheduled a quarter ahead automatically. Free nights that still need a reservation are part of the same system.

Payment without a middleman account. The money goes straight from the guest to the venue’s own account. Mollie and Stripe are supported; iDEAL works with both, and the provider most used in your country is listed first.

In the guest’s own calendar. Every night has an “Add to calendar” link: a plain .ics file with the right time, the venue and the doors time. If a night is called off, the appointment is marked cancelled instead of quietly disappearing.

Tickets that arrive. The ticket email is one of the few emails where delivery really matters. So the plugin checks SPF, DKIM and DMARC, processes bounces, and shows on the dashboard which guest did not get their tickets.

A door scanner that works offline. The tickets live on the device, signed, so the scanner can tell on its own whether a QR code is genuine even without wifi. Scans are sent along as soon as there is a connection again. A ticket for a different night is recognised, and on a second scan it tells you what time the first one was.

And what happens at the bar. Someone walks in without a ticket: sell one at the door, cash or card, and let them straight in. Someone transfers the money or pays later: mark that order as paid by hand. Both count normally towards revenue, the VAT return and the head count at the door.

Migrating from another plugin

Already running The Events Calendar with Event Tickets? The plugin converts those events in place: the same page, the same address, the same image and the same SEO fields. No search results are lost and shared links keep working. Orders and attendees come along as history.

Selling with Event Tickets Plus through WooCommerce? That comes along too: there a ticket is a WooCommerce product and an order is a WooCommerce order, and both are read. The rest of your shop is left alone. Always start with the dry run: it changes nothing and shows what would happen.

What it deliberately does not do

No seat maps, no time slots, no subscriptions. This is built for nights where people walk in, not for theatres with numbered rows.

External services

This plugin can connect to the external services below. Nothing is sent anywhere until you choose to.

Mollie (payment provider). When you connect your Mollie account, the plugin creates payments and refunds through the Mollie API on your behalf. The order number, amount, description and your site’s hostname are sent with each payment. See the Mollie terms and privacy policy.

Stripe (payment provider). When you connect your Stripe account, payments and refunds are created on your Stripe account through smoothentree.com (see below), because Stripe only lets the platform add the service fee. The order number, amount, description, your site’s hostname and the guest’s email address are sent with each payment. See the Stripe terms and privacy policy.

Postmark (email delivery, optional). Only when you choose Postmark as the sending method under Ticket sales, Settings and enter an API token, the plugin sends email through the Postmark API (api.postmarkapp.com). What is sent, each time an email is sent: the sender name and address you configured, the recipient’s email address, the subject, the text and HTML body of the message, and its attachments (the QR code images of the tickets). The plugin also reads delivery and bounce notifications that Postmark sends back to your site, so the dashboard can show which guest did not receive their tickets. See the Postmark terms and privacy policy.

Resend (email delivery, optional). Only when you choose Resend as the sending method and enter an API key, the plugin sends email through the Resend API (api.resend.com). The same data is sent as for Postmark: sender, recipient, subject, both bodies and the attachments, each time an email is sent, plus the delivery and bounce notifications that come back. See the Resend terms and privacy policy.

Pay. (payment provider, disabled by default). The adapter for Pay. (pay.nl) ships with the plugin but is not available in the settings; a site only gets it by enabling it with the filter smoothentree_experimental_gateways. If it is enabled and you enter your Pay. credentials, payments and refunds are created through the Pay. API (rest.pay.nl): the order number, the amount, a short description of the event, your Pay. service id and the addresses this site should be sent back to. See the Pay. terms and privacy policy.

smoothentree.com (the connection service for this plugin). When you click “Connect with Mollie” or “Connect with Stripe”, your browser is sent to smoothentree.com, which forwards you to Mollie and receives the access tokens on your behalf; the tokens are then handed back to your site in encrypted form. After that, your site contacts smoothentree.com once a day and before a payment when the token is about to expire, to refresh the token and to read the current service fee. What is sent: the refresh token (Mollie), your site’s URL and a connection id. For Stripe, every payment, status check and refund passes through smoothentree.com, which forwards it to Stripe on behalf of your account. The service keeps a record of which sites are connected and when they were last seen; it does not store your tokens. Without the connection, paid tickets are not possible; free reservations work without any external service. See the terms and privacy statement.

Service fee. Each paid ticket carries a small fixed service fee for Smooth Entree, split off during payment. By default the guest pays it and it is shown as a separate line on the receipt, so the venue pays nothing; in the settings the venue can choose to carry it instead. This fee is separate from the transaction costs charged by your own payment provider, which you agree with them and which do not pass through us.

Included software

The door scanner uses jsQR (https://github.com/cozmo/jsQR, Apache License
2.0) to read QR codes in browsers without a built-in BarcodeDetector, which in
practice means mostly Safari on iOS. The unminified source is in
assets/vendor/jsqr.js, with the licence next to it.