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EventPrime Review: A New WordPress Event Manager Plugin

Last Updated on January 3rd, 2024

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Need a way to manage and display events on your WordPress site? In our EventPrime review, we’ll give you a look at a brand new event manager plugin that’s available for free at WordPress.org.

EventPrime is a plugin from the same team as the RegistrationMagic plugin we’ve reviewed. It lets you create events, manage performers and venues, display your events in a few different ways, plus a lot more.

Keep reading our EventPrime review for a deeper look at the feature list and a hands-on tour of how everything works.

EventPrime Review: The Feature List

EventPrime is an event manager plugin, which basically means that it helps you create and manage events on the backend, and then display those events to visitors on the frontend. EventPrime also has basic functionality for booking, including options to set capacity limits and let visitors cancel bookings after-the-fact.

On the backend, EventPrime gives you lots of options for managing recurring event details, with the ability to add and manage:

  • Event types
  • Locations
  • Performers
  • Attendees

For each event, you’ll be able to:

  • Add pictures and text to describe the event
  • Choose the start/stop date/time (or make it an all-day event)
  • Enable bookings, and create an event registration form

Then, to help your visitors find events, you get several different options to display events on the frontend including:

  • Calendar
  • Card
  • List

You can also add search/filter options to your event display to help visitors find events. And the plugin also comes with shortcodes that let visitors view events by performer, type, location, etc.

Ready to see how these features work? Let’s go hands-on with EventPrime…

Hands-on With EventPrime

Next, I’ll take you through setting up the plugin, creating an event, and displaying those events on the front-end.

Setting Up The Global Settings

Once you’ve installed and activated the plugin, you can go to EventPrime → Global Settings to configure some global defaults.

EventPrime review settings

There’s not too much to configure here, but you can:

  • Edit the text and design of your transactional emails (like a booking confirmation email)
  • Choose the default pages for important content, like the event listing page. EventPrime creates these by default, so you don’t really need to do anything unless you want to make changes.
  • Configure social sharing and the ability for people to add events to Google Calendar
  • Choose whether or not to show past (already happened) events in the event directory

For example, in the Email Notifications settings, you can use a WYSIWYG editor and merge fields to customize your emails:

email templates

Creating A New Event

Once you’ve set up the global settings, you’re ready to create your new event.

There are a couple of UI quirks in this interface, but it’s easy enough to use.

To get started, you go to EventPrime → All Events. Here, you’ll see a calendar of all your upcoming events. To add a new event, you click the Add New button and that will open a popup where you can configure some very basic information for the event:

add new event

Once you click Save, the event will appear on the calendar. If you hover over it, you can click the Dashboard button to go to the full settings area:

event settings

This gives you a lot more options:

detailed event settings

Setting Up Event Settings

To get started, you can use the Event Settings option to configure important details for your event.

At the top, you can set the event type:

Setting Up Event Settings

Below that, you can:

  • Add a text description
  • Choose a featured image
  • Upload more images in an event gallery

event info

Below that, you can edit the event time. And if you choose to enable bookings, you can also choose a start/end time for when people can actually book (for example, maybe you don’t want to allow last-minute bookings):

event info

You also get a few other options, like the ability to let people cancel their booking, an option to hide the event from certain frontend display locations, and the ability to add notes for attendees:

event info

Setting Up The Location

Next, you can use the Event Site/Location options to add the location of your event and its capacity (for bookings – you can also enter 0 to make it unlimited):

Setting Up The Location

Adding Performers and Social Integration

If your event has performers, the Performers area lets you add one or more presenters/performers:

Adding Performers and Social Integration

And the Social Integration area lets you connect your event to a Facebook page:

Social Integration

Managing Locations, Performers, Etc.

The weird interface quirk I mentioned above is these Global Settings for event types, locations, performers, etc:

Managing Locations, Performers, Etc.

These are where you can manage all of your global options for these…but you can only access them when editing an individual event.

I think these menus should definitely be added as sub-menus in the EventPrime area of the sidebar to make them easier to access, because they aren’t tied to a single event.

These areas are quite helpful/important. For example, if you go to the Event Site Manager, you’ll see all of your locations:

Event Site Manager

Editing a location lets you add more details, including:

  • Description
  • Established date
  • Seating type
  • Operator
  • Location Facebook page
  • Image gallery

Editor Details

Similarly, the Performers area lets you add more details for performers:

Performers area

Displaying Events On The Frontend

Once you’ve created some events, EventPrime gives you several ways to display them on the frontend.

First, you get the default pages. The main Events page lists all of your events and lets visitors:

  • Choose from different views
  • Search and filter events

For example, here’s what the Card view looks like:

Displaying Events On The Frontend

And here’s the Calendar – Month view (you can use different colors for different event types, which is a nice feature):

example of event calendar

Beyond that, EventPrime also creates pages for:

  • Event types
  • Locations
  • Performers

These pages display a list of all the relevant options. Then, visitors can pick a specific option to see only events at that location, with a specific performer, etc.:

performer list

Beyond that, you also get lots of shortcodes that you can use to display specific events (these are all listed in your dashboard at EventPrime → Publish Shortcodes), as well as widgets to help you display an event…

  • Countdown timer
  • Slider
  • Calendar
  • Site map (a Google Map with markers for all event locations)

Individual Events and the Booking Process

Here’s an idea of what individual event pages look like, as well as how the booking process works.

At the top, visitors get a summary of the event, as well as a CTA to make a booking (if enabled):

individual event

Below that, they’ll see more information, as well as details on any performers/locations:

more event details

If they go to make a booking, they’ll first need to register for your site:

booking form

Then, they can make their booking:

booking tickets

After making their booking, they’ll be able to manage basic booking details from a frontend user profile (if you allow cancellation, they’ll also be able to do that here):

profile

And then you’ll also be able to manage attendees from the backend of your site:

manage attendees from the backend

EventPrime Pricing: How Much Will It Cost?

At the moment, EventPrime is 100% free and available at WordPress.org.

However, I’m sure that as the plugin matures, there will eventually be new premium functionality, so make sure to check that if you read this in the future.

Final Thoughts On EventPrime

Because EventPrime is brand new, I think there are still a few quirks to be ironed out. For example, the interface could be better designed to give you easier access to your locations/performers, and there was a weird quirk where EventPrime lists a price on the booking page despite not giving you an option to set an event’s price (at least not that I could find).

However, that’s all stuff that can easily be fixed as the plugin grows, and there are definitely some things I like about EventPrime.

For example, I like how many ways it gives you to display events (and for visitors to find events). Beyond an overall list of events, you can list out locations, event types, and performers, which makes it easy for visitors to find events that interest them.

Additionally, I like the default design of the overall event list/individual events. They look pretty good out of the box (at least on the Astra theme), which isn’t always the case with event calendar plugins.

Finally, because it’s 100% free right now, you can download it straight from WordPress.org and give it a try on your site at zero risk:

Get EventPrime

A team of WordPress experts that love to test out new WordPress related software, WordPress plugins and WordPress themes.