BitForgeNet Guest Tickets and Door Check-in

Description

BitForgeNet Guest Tickets runs the evening from the first booking to the last
guest through the door. It was built for clubs, bars and party promoters — the
people for whom an event is a door, a list, and a queue outside.

Nothing is capped and nothing is metered. There is no per-ticket fee, no
external service to sign up for, no account to create, and no telemetry. Your
guest list lives in your own database, on your own server.

Who it is for

  • Clubs, bars and late-night venues
  • Party and concert promoters
  • Private events, galas and weddings
  • Associations, schools and community evenings
  • Anyone taking bookings by transfer, WhatsApp or cash rather than by card

Every guest is a person, not a number

A booking for five asks for five names, and each one gets their own ticket with
its own QR code. One code cannot let five people in, and the door knows who is
standing in front of it.

Tickets that look like tickets

Each one is drawn at 100 x 250 mm, 300 dpi, with the QR engraved into the
artwork, and delivered as a PDF by email. Mail servers strip attachments more
often than they admit, so every message also carries a download link for each
guest.

The door works

Open the check-in station on any phone — no app to install. Point it at a
ticket and it answers in one screen: valid, already used, or not for tonight.
Counters update live, several phones can scan the same event at once, and when
the venue’s wifi gives up — it will — there is a printable roll-call list with
every guest and every ticket number on it.

Payment on your terms

A booking arrives pending. You confirm the payment however you actually take it
— bank transfer, WhatsApp, cash at the office — and the tickets go out the
moment you do. Nothing is issued for money you have not received.

What the free plugin does

Everything below is in this plugin. There is nothing to unlock.

  • Unlimited events and unlimited tickets. No cap, no per-ticket fee.
  • Event editor — a four-step wizard to create one, six tabs to refine it:
    dates, capacity, price, registration window, description, artwork.
  • Organizers library — name, logo, colours, contact. Reused across events.
  • Venues library — address, capacity, notes. Reused across events.
  • Public booking page — one shortcode, [bitforgenet_registration]. Asks
    for the name of every person coming, respects capacity and the registration
    window, and confirms on screen.
  • Bookings screen — search, filter by event and status, confirm payment,
    add an internal note, resend an email, cancel.
  • Personal QR tickets — one per guest, rendered as a PDF, sent by email
    with a download link alongside.
  • Built-in ticket design, generated in the colour of your choice and
    painted on demand at 300 dpi.
  • Door check-in station for any phone, opened with a per-event door code,
    with live counters and multi-station scanning.
  • Printable roll-call list for the evenings the network fails.
  • CSV export with a column picker — bookings or guests, one event or all,
    every field the plugin holds, and it remembers what you ticked.
  • Tools and data — a system check that tells you why a ticket or an email
    did not arrive, a test-ticket email, a database check, and an
    archive-and-clear that copies every booking into archive tables before
    emptying the live ones, behind a one-time code sent to an address you
    nominate.
  • Searchable archive of everything that has been cleared.
  • Activity log — who did what, and when.
  • Delete-all-data on uninstall, if you tick it. Off by default.

BitForgeNet Pro

Pro is a separate plugin, bought from us and installed alongside this one. It
does not unlock anything here — this plugin is complete on its own. Pro adds
capabilities that are not in it at all:

  • Ticket studio — bring in your own artwork, generate colour variations of
    it, and move every printed field where you want it with a visual field map.
  • Seating and tables — draw the floor, assign a seat or a table to each
    guest, and print it on the ticket.
  • Price categories — VIP, table, early bird, member: several prices on one
    event instead of one.
  • Discount codes — fixed or percentage, limited by date or by number of
    uses.
  • Online card payment — the booking pays itself and the tickets go out with
    no confirmation step. This is what the first Pro release is being built
    around.

Pro is announced at https://bitforgenet.dev/

Privacy

The plugin stores what a booking needs — names, email address, phone number —
in your own database, on your own server. It sends nothing anywhere else. Email
goes out through WordPress, which means through whatever mail service your site
already uses. There is no external service, no account to create, and no
telemetry.

Installation

Requirements

  • WordPress 5.8 or later
  • PHP 7.4 or later
  • The GD extension, for rendering the tickets
  • A working mail setup on the site — an SMTP plugin if your host’s mail is
    unreliable

Steps

  1. Plugins -> Add New, search for BitForgeNet Guest Tickets, install and
    activate. Or upload the ZIP under Plugins -> Add New -> Upload Plugin.
  2. Open BitForgeNet -> Settings and set your currency, your From address
    and your payment instructions.
  3. Open BitForgeNet -> Tools & data, run the system check, then send
    yourself a test ticket. Do this before your first real booking, not after.
  4. Create your first event with BitForgeNet -> Events -> New event.
  5. Put the booking form on a page with the shortcode
    [bitforgenet_registration].
  6. On the night, open BitForgeNet -> Door scanner, note the door code, and
    give the link and the code to whoever is on the door.

FAQ

Is there a limit on events, guests or tickets?

No. Nothing in this plugin is capped or metered, and there is no per-ticket
fee. What your server can hold is the limit.

Do guests need an account?

No. A guest fills in the form, receives their tickets by email, and shows the
QR code at the door.

Does it need WooCommerce?

No. It has its own booking form and its own bookings screen, and it works on a
site with no shop on it.

Can I take payment online?

Not in the free plugin. A booking arrives pending and you confirm it once you
have been paid — by transfer, by WhatsApp, or in cash. Card payment is what
BitForgeNet Pro is being built around.

Does one booking give one QR code for everybody?

No, and that is the point. A booking for five produces five tickets with five
different codes, each carrying the name of the person it belongs to.

The tickets are not arriving.

The plugin sends through WordPress, so anything that fixes email for the rest
of your site fixes it here. Run Tools & data -> System check first: it says
whether the failure is in the rendering or in the sending. If your host’s mail
is unreliable, install an SMTP plugin and connect a real mailbox — it will be
picked up automatically.

The email arrives but the PDF is missing.

Your mail server is stripping the attachment. Lower the attachment ceiling in
Settings; every email already carries a download link per guest, so the guest
still gets their ticket.

Does the door scanner need internet?

It needs to reach your own website, the same as any other page. For the
evenings when the venue’s wifi is not to be trusted, print the roll-call list
first: it carries every guest and every ticket number, and it works on paper.

Do I need to install an app on the door phone?

No. The station is a web page. Open the link in the phone’s browser, enter the
door code, and allow the camera.

Can two people scan at once?

Yes. Every station checks the same database, so a ticket used at one door is
already used at the other.

The camera stays black on the door phone.

The page must be served over HTTPS — browsers refuse the camera otherwise. If
the site is already on HTTPS, a security plugin or your CDN is probably sending
a blanket camera policy; the scanner screen re-states its own, so clearing the
CDN cache usually settles it.

Can I use my own ticket artwork?

The free plugin generates its design for you, in the colour you choose.
Bringing in your own artwork and placing the printed fields yourself is what
the ticket studio in BitForgeNet Pro does.

Can I clear the test bookings before going live?

Yes. Tools & data -> Archive and clear copies every booking, guest, ticket
and scan into archive tables and then empties the live ones. Events, venues,
organizers and designs are untouched. It asks for a one-time code sent to an
address you set, so it cannot be run by accident.

Is it translated?

Every string in the plugin is translatable. Translations are welcome at
https://translate.wordpress.org/projects/wp-plugins/bitforgenet-guest-tickets/

Where do I get help?

The support forum on this page, or contact@bitforgenet.dev

Reviews

There are no reviews for this plugin.

Contributors & Developers

“BitForgeNet Guest Tickets and Door Check-in” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.

Contributors

Changelog

1.0.9

  • The logo printed on the ticket, on the door’s code screen and beside an
    organizer with no artwork of its own is the anvil alone. It had been the full
    lockup, wordmark included, which the renderer fits inside its box: a wide
    image with words in it shrank to a smudge nobody could read
  • The plugin’s page is rewritten. The feature list now says what this plugin
    actually does — the organizer and venue libraries, the export column picker,
    the system check and the archive were all shipped and none of them were
    mentioned, while three of them were wrongly described as belonging to Pro.
    The Pro section says what Pro adds instead of hinting at it, and the FAQ
    answers fifteen questions rather than five. No code changed for this

1.0.8

  • Every template under admin/views/ and public/views/ states once, at the top of
    the file, that the PrefixAllGlobals naming rule does not apply to it. A
    template is included from a method, never at file scope, so its variables
    belong to that method’s scope rather than the global one, and PHPCS — reading
    each file on its own — has no way to see where the include happens. No
    variable was renamed and nothing behaves differently

1.0.7

  • The plugin is renamed. It was submitted as “2KEvents”, and “2K” is a
    registered trademark of Take-Two Interactive that we have no right to lead a
    name with. The display name, the slug, the text domain, the shortcodes and
    every PHP prefix now read BitForgeNet — the name of the site that publishes
    it, bitforgenet.dev
  • Every stylesheet and script the plugin prints goes out through the enqueue
    API. The door station and the two screens around it are their own HTML
    documents, served on their own endpoint before the theme runs, so they had
    carried their CSS and JS inside the page. They now register handles and print
    them by name, the two runtime values arriving through wp_add_inline_style()
    and wp_add_inline_script()
  • The admin menu icon is assembled from the mark at runtime and has no file
    behind it, so it registers a style handle with no source rather than printing
    a style tag into the head, and moves to admin_enqueue_scripts
  • The code prefix is five characters. It was three, which is under the four the
    directory asks for

1.0.6

  • Finished the tidy-up the last two releases started: every code-quality
    suppression in the plugin is now either stated once for a whole file or
    written on the single line it covers, and none of them can change the
    meaning of another one elsewhere in the same file. No behaviour changes

1.0.5

  • Fixed suppression comments that did not cover what they appeared to cover.
    One kind switched every code-quality rule back on rather than the one it had
    switched off, quietly undoing notes written elsewhere in the same file; the
    other sat above a nine-line statement instead of around it. No behaviour
    changes for anyone using the plugin

1.0.4

  • Request input is now read the way it should be read: eight admin screens
    applied the integer cast to the whole expression rather than to the value,
    and the export column list is sanitised where it arrives rather than three
    calls later
  • The design proof screen now checks its parameter exists before reading it
  • Every file that queries the plugin’s own tables says so once, at the top,
    with the reason
  • Dropped a call asking WordPress to load translations it already loads by
    itself, and closed a hatch that let the QR encoder run outside WordPress

1.0.3

  • Fixed translatable strings that a translator could not have got right. The
    guest counter on an order wrote its two numbers as bare placeholders, which
    a language that reorders the words has no way to move, and several strings
    carrying a placeholder had no note saying what the placeholder holds.

1.0.2

  • The plugin header pointed at a placeholder address. It now points at the
    plugin’s own page, and the author is named.
  • The address authorised to reset the plugin’s data shipped with a developer’s
    own address already filled in. It now starts empty, and the tool refuses to
    run until an administrator sets one.
  • Added the full text of the SIL Open Font License beside the bundled Poppins
    and Lora fonts, as that licence requires.

1.0.1

  • Fixed the door station refusing every scan with “Station closed”. The page
    opened and showed the event, but each scan was posted to an address that no
    longer said which event the station was watching, so the server treated it as
    a station that had signed out. Nobody could be checked in

1.0.0

  • First release.