Calendar Plugin Must-Haves for your Membership Site
If you run a membership site, there are probably several things you want members to be able to do that non-members can’t – including attending and purchasing tickets for events.
That’s where a calendar plugin can come in handy. A calendar plugin on your membership site can help you run events and sell tickets for your membership community. This can include both events open to the public, and ones exclusively for members.
Combining your membership site with The Events Calendar can add a ton of functionality. Let’s explore how the variety of features available from The Events Calendar can extend your membership benefits.
The Events Calendar
Membership sites can use The Events Calendar to publish and manage events in a calendar format. It’s free and available in the WordPress Plugin Directory. Each event you create with the plugin has the option to be blocked from non-members. You can also hide your archive of events from those who aren’t active members.
Events Calendar Pro boosts The Events Calendar with a bunch of additional features. The best feature of a membership site is the ability to unlock calendar shortcodes. Here are the shortcodes you’ll have access to with Events Calendar Pro:
- Calendar shortcode. Embed a full calendar view into a page or post. It includes options for displaying certain calendar views (e.g. month view), event categories, and date ranges.
- Event shortcode. Embed a specific event (or certain details from that event) to a page or post, and then limit access to that page.
- Calendar widgets. Each of the widgets included in Events Calendar Pro has a shortcode that can embed on a page or post. This could come in handy when crafting a landing page for certain members, or even on their profile pages.
Shortcodes like these open up a lot of possibilities on a membership site. You can display a calendar filtered to members-only events, to showing event information that only members have access to view.
Event Tickets
Event Tickets can help create tickets for events published on your calendar. This free solution works if you’re trying to create tickets that only members can purchase.
You’ll want to upgrade to Event Tickets Plus to connect to ecommerce plugins and restrict tickets to specific groups of users. When you connect Events Tickets Plus to an ecommerce plugin, your ticket becomes a custom product post that you can then restrict to members only inside your general store.
Event Tickets Plus also includes shortcodes that can be used to embed tickets on a WordPress page or post. That way, when your membership plugin limits access to certain pages, you can drop tickets into those pages that only members can see.
Community Events
Community Events allows users to publish events to your website calendar without needing access to the WordPress admin. The benefits of a crowd-sourced calendar are plenty: users create content for you, and it’s another possible way to generate revenue.
Community Events adds a form to your site for folks to submit events, as well as a “My Events” page that allows users to see events they have submitted to the calendar.
A membership plugin can be used to limit access to these pages. For example, you can restrict submission to members only, or only allow a higher tier of members to see and attend community-submitted events. That gives you an opportunity to earn money from folks submitting and managing events through your website.
Community Events includes shortcodes for those pages as well, so you can drop the submission form into your own pages and restrict access specifically for those pages.
Community Tickets
Community Tickets connects Event Tickets Plus to Community Events so that members can create tickets for the events they submit to your calendar. This means that members get to sell their own tickets, and you get to take a slice of the revenue if you choose.
Since you can limit access to the form, you are also limiting who can create a ticket. Once a ticket is created, you might also choose to limit who can purchase those tickets. This can be a great way to act as a facilitator for popular community events for members of your site.
Do More With Your Membership with a Calendar Plugin
Combining a membership site with a calendar plugin is a no-brainer. You not only can restrict events and tickets, but curate community-submitted events to start cultivating an exclusive feel.
See how events can help you build a thriving membership community by playing around with a membership plugin and calendar plugin on a live WordPress demo site.