Katharine, if this is so important for you nor show the event as a continuous bar, then the only option is to create first event (on the start date) with of the details and registration options, and then create manually all the rest (12, if I'm understand properly) for required dates (Wed) but without ability to register. In the details for these "fake" 12 events you can provide a link to the very first event with all the details and ability to register. To simplify creation of the fake events, you can create first one manually and the rest using copy feature.

This is very tiresome workaround but there is nothing I can suggest you instead, sorry.

Thank you for your prompt reply - on a Saturday no less.

If I do as you suggest, that would handle the issue of registering for the series as a single event, But someone looking at the calendar would see a continous bar for the event I suppose.

I wonder if there is a way to mock up the actual dates and times on the calendar, but somehow not have them as events that one can register for. Can I set up "fake events" - perhaps with a limit of zero attendees - as a way to get the workshop series showing on the calendar? I would be willing to do the copying needed if so. The verbiage and links for each fake event could send them to the right place for more information or to register for the next similar event.

We'd like the calendars to show what's actually happening.

I'd be so relieved to hear back from you yet this weekend. I am supposed to have something ready by Monday :)

Hi Katharine

(1) Sorry, no. We cannot promise the dates as everything can change along the road - we used to promise specific date but then we failed several times and now we do not specify any date. As a general rule, you should rely on what Wild Apricot can suggest now, not in future.

(2) There is no convenient way to do what you need. I can suggest you to create an event that starts at one day and ends in 13 weeks after that. In event details you can specify that it goes on specific day only (e.g. Wed, 7-9pm). In this case people will be able to register and pay in full before the event.

Prorates is not something we support now for late event registrations and it is not in our analysis scope for recurring events, sorry.

I need recurring events ASAP.

(1) Can you be more specific about when it will be available?

(2) In the meanwhile, can you please tell me quickest way to set up our events as follows:

We have a 13 week workshop. We meet online from 7-9pm on Wednesdays.

I want people to be able to register and pay for the entire event.

I want people to see the entire series on the calendar and all the dates on the event page

The above is critical functionality for our organization because we offer many events that are a series, both in person and online.

In addition:

In general, we do not allow people to register for a series after it has begun. But sometimes, if people meet certain conditions (i.e., they watch the video of the previous workshops), we allow them to join the workshop at a pro-rated price.

Margaret, we are analyzing and designing this functionality now - and hope to include into one of the next few versions (~end of 2013 - early 2014). What would help us the most are detailed examples of how this would ideally work/be used in your particular organization.

As a growing educational non-profit we are moving from monthly meetings of different interests to events (classes) which will occur weekly and the inability to do recurring events significantly increases the amount of labor necessary to set them up. Some of the previous posts infer this feature is on the drawing board from as far back as 2008. I strongly encourage you to revisit this and include in your next set of new features! Please advise if this cannot be accomplished as our organization will soon then outgrow Wild Apricot and need to look for a product with more robust features.

We currently have 652 requests on this forum. Every year we address some - and some more are added. We will keep enhancing and improving our product - but some requests might take years to get to and some we might to decide not to pursue.

Having said this, recurring events is one of the top candidates for version 5.1 (~ end of this year).

I'm very disappointed with WA for still not having this resolved. I already posted in 2011. This was started in 2008. That's FIVE years to get this done.

Looking forward to the completion of the recurring event feature :)

It would be nice to have a "calendar view" that also shows "start time" and location.

It would also be nice to have a "daily view" of the calendar (not just weekly, monthly, yearly, and list views). Showing blocks of times w/ time and location would be great too.

This is turning into a deal-breaker for me. It's getting to the point where I would rather rebuild my website elsewhere than continue to enter 4 weekly meetings every week in perpetuity. It's ridiculous.

@chapka: thank you very much for your ideas - they are very valuable. I'll try to use them in the design of the feature but not very soon, unfortunately. Anyway, your idea with adding specific dates to event is great, it can resolve almost all cases!

For us , during the summer , we hold camps at our facility. When we post the dates.... example June 5 9am to june 8 4pm it looks to be a continual camp when in fact it is June 5, 6, 7, 8 from 9-4

Another type of camps are Tuesday and thursday sessions for 2 or 3 weeks so we put the start date , end date and the dexcription of the day times and location.

It does get a bit hecktic.

I just look at the outlook programming, and think it is so similar!

Anne

We are trying to move our events to WildApricot and this is an issue for us as well.

In our case, we run events on an irregular schedule, with different days and times each week, so something like Gordon's suggestion would actually be more helpful than only giving us regular "every week" style options.

However, I wanted to share how our current solution works, because it's more or less ideal for our needs and seems like it should be--not easy--but relatively easy to implement.

1) We set up the basics of our first event--ticket prices, time, date, discount codes, etc.

2) We click "Add a date to this event" and add a second date. With the new date, we can add a brief description. Everything else is attached to the "main" event.

For example, we run tailgate party fundraisers during the season. We enter "2012 Tailgates," fill in the basic information with prices, add dates: Sunday at noon with a description of "vs. Colorado," then the next Saturday at 4 PM with a description of "vs. Vancouver."

When the user goes to sign up, they see the event description and a list of dates. They pick the date they want to attend and check out.

Meanwhile, if something changes, we just change the "event" and unsold tickets for all dates are changed, just as if you changed something in a single event. You don't have to create or edit 52 descriptions if your event happens every week. But if you do have changes in lecture, ride leader, etc., you can use the one-line date description to deal with that.

This makes sense for a lot of different events--for example, a show plays Friday, Saturday, and Sunday matinee: it makes sense to have one description and just have three dates to choose from when you buy your ticket. A lecture series can have its own page describing the whole series, with a brief description of the lecture that will happen on each date--"March 24, Dr. Samuel Pickwick on Coaching Inns." A bike ride will have a main page with general information, then for each date "June 8, led by E. Merckx. Meet at Pioneer Square."

The event copying would work for us in the short term--but in the long term what would be most useful, for us and I'm guessing for many others, would be to create a to-many relationship between the "event" wrapper and the ticketing date.

Yes, the ability to Add/Change and Delete several events in a single request meets my definition of "Recurring Events". This approach is not how Google Calendar does it but if it gets us to essentially the same place and does so sooner than other approaches might allow, I doubt there will be a lot of complaint.

There are some limitations to this approach.
1. Since the events in a series are linked by their name, they must all have the same name.
2. Since the Add function will create real events, there will have to be a limit on how far into the future a series can run - a year is probably a good place to start.

You suggest that the Add and Change are separate events, I would expect them to be a single option. For instance, we may have a monthly event we set up to run from Jan to June. In April we decide to extend it through December and would want to issue an Add/Change to run May - December. The logic would be "If it exists change it otherwise add it".

The other half of the proposal was a method for selecting the dates for the recurring events. Obviously, there is the usual "First Friday of every month" approach, but there will inevitability be sequences this will not support. For instance, I have a monthly event on the Thursday before the second Wednesday.
The other approach is to pop up a 365 day calendar and allow the user to click on each day the event is to occur. This places no limits on the sequence of dates and is (probably) easier (quicker?) for you to implement. It's a bit more work for us to manage but for me the freedom to choose any bizarre date sequence would be well worth the effort.

I hope that others will want to chime in on this!!

Gordon, thanks for reply - and especially for giving insight into your organization setup. As far as I understand, we are speaking about of the following features:

(A) - ability to create multiple copies of any single event (with a simple and usable way of selecting dates for new events, each new event is independent on others)
(B) - ability to easy delete multiple events - to balance (A)
(C) - ability to easy update description for multiple events or even auto-update description for all events with the same name (sure, ask to confirm before auto-updating)

You say that those 3 things above will help you to setup your events and actually will even substitute your initial request of recurring events.

I would like other to comment this suggestion - I am not sure that proposed change would be clear to use and administrators will figure out how to use them for their needs.

But I might be wrong and the 3 simple changes you propose are really helpful for others and clear to use.

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Egveny -

Thanks for the query, it's great to be able to participate in design discussions. This is a follow-up on my post of 12/29/11 above.

1. It would obviously be useful if we could replicate an existing event for a series of dates into the future. However, if that's all it did it would be far from ideal since it assumes that all future versions of the event are not subject to change - or if they are they would have to be changed individually.

For instance, I have a regularly scheduled series of bike rides at http://srcc.memberlodge.com/calendar?eventId=438980 which happens every Friday. While the basic structure is fixed, the details of who is leading the various rides changes frequently. When a new ride leader steps forward, I need to update the next and subsequent events with that information. Changes of this type are random but expected to last for an indeterminate time into the future. This is why in my original post I suggested that when an event is being replicated, if an event with the same name already exists the new display data would overlay the old. This would allow us to update a series of existing events with new details in the same way as we initially created the events. It would be entirely equivalent to the current practice of selecting an existing event and making changes to the displayed information without affecting any existing registrations for the events.

2. Yes, if we're creating a new event I'd assume that copied events inherit the registration work-flow and all other details (except date) from their parent. The process would be identical to the current "Copy Event" except that we can create numerous copies for the dates we specify.

I think this would work fine for the "Courses" scenario too.

If the course were the same class taught on different weekends, it could either be handled by allowing the attendee to register for the weekend they choose or to consolidate the registrations into a single event and have the registrant select the session(s) they want to attend from a dropdown list. In the latter case I'd assume that the event page for weeks 2-n would have link to the registration version of the event. This would require two different events - one for the registration and an second that is replicated for each week of the series.

At the risk of being accused of "Feature Creep", if we are able to create numerous events, how do we get rid of them? It's entirely probable that a weekly Wednesday event could be shifted to a weekly Thursday event. If I had a year's worth of the Wednesday event scheduled I'd face a daunting task of deleting 52 old Wednesday events individually and a simpler task of creating 52 new Thursday events! Obviously, what I'd hope for here is a corresponding facility which invokes the current "Delete Event" logic (complete with confirmation) in the same way as we'd create events.

One way to invoke these features would be to add two buttons the the "Add Event" screen. At present we have "Create new event" and "Copy existing event" options. The Copy option could be expanded with two additional buttons "Copy existing event multiple times" and "Delete existing events". Both of the new options would require that an existing event be selected and would use the pop up the 365 day calendar for date selection.

In making these suggestions, I've tried to avoid creating any new capabilities. Everything I've suggested can already be done one event at a time. I'm hoping for the ability to be able to invoke existing capabilities for more than one event per request.

Gordon, could you please comment the following:

1) How valuable it would be if we do the solution you suggested (extending event copy function with ability to create multiple event on a robust schedule) but *without* ability to make further linked updates (admin will have to update each event separately)

2) If we go the way you suggested, each event is on its own after copying - and this means that each event his own registration workflow.

Basically speaking, this solution will not cover in any way the "courses" scenarios - when there is a single course that goes for example for 4 weeks each weekend, user can register once for the course but not for specific weekend. Your solution would create multiple independent events for each weekend with ability to register to each one.

Would it be really helpful? I would also appreciate others comments on this particular note.

I am new to this game but am absolutely dumfounded that I am unable to post a recurring event. This is not good!

Yeah, what they said! I run 3-4 events a week through my social club and don't run recurring events because the effort involved is no different than running different events - would love to be able to create set and forget recurring events!

cheers

Gordon's solution would be a godsend to me. We have two Board meetings every week, each with a deadline. I have to recreate all four weekly events manually in perpetuity. It is the single most tedious part of my job. I would give you my first born son if you could add a recurring event feature!