Over the last little while we have been working on refining Guestlist and adding features to smoothen the overall experience. There are quite a number of smaller changes and adjustments, some of which you may have already noticed.

PDF ticket tweaks

PDF tickets now display event logos instead of attendee photos. A number of event hosts pointed out that while personalized tickets were neat, it is important to have a strong brand for your event.

Max tickets per event

Often event hosts set caps on different ticket types but still need to ensure they don’t end up with too many attendees overall. Guestlist now allows you to set a limit on the total number of tickets that can be sold for your event.

Option to make sure new attendees receive info emails

When you send an all attendees email, you now have the option to have it automatically delivered to future registrants on signup. This can be very useful for sending special instructions or any custom message that you want attendees to see as soon as they register.

Coming Soon status for tickets

Sometimes you want to announce an event and start marketing it before tickets go on sale. Now you can setup Coming Soon tickets so that visitors can view your event page but not register until you open up ticket sales.

Social sharing links now optional

You can now hide the social sharing links via the Event Settings > Advanced Settings pane. This is useful if you are running a private event and don’t want to encourage attendees to share the event page url on Facebook or Twitter.

Limit the amount of tickets per order

Another setting you will find in the Advanced Settings pane is the ability to restrict the number of tickets per order. This will not prevent people from making multiple orders, but if you are expecting a registration rush this can be a useful way to give more people a shot at registering.

Speed optimizations

Guestlist has been growing strongly over the last few months so we decided to tighten some bolts to make sure it stays as fast as possible. You should notice a pretty hefty increase in speed while using the application.

We have just released an integration with Intercom to see if we can push our customer support experience to the next level. When you click help in the app from now on you will be presented with a dialog showing you all the communication you’ve ever had with us, and the ability to contact us with questions and feedback.

Intercom also gives us the ability to communicate more easily with our users. With Intercom we can broadcast notices to keep you up to date with what we are working on, let you know about new features, give tips on how to better leverage Guestlist, and more.

We have also released an Advanced Settings tab to give you more control over your events. There are some settings for events that don’t often need to be changed but are sometimes important.

The first setting we are making available in this section is order limit. This will restrict how many tickets of each ticket type can be purchased within an order. We occasionally receive requests for this but never saw it as something a most users should need to make decisions about. While we don’t want to burden users with unnecessary choices we also don’t want to limit needed functionality so we will be tucking away such options in this tab.

If you want to give us feedback on what we should be working on now would be the perfect time to give our new help section a try. Finally, support@guestlistapp.com will of course continue to work as before.

Have you ever wondered how people find out about your events? Are you better off promoting them on Twitter or via email? Starting today you can find out thanks to our new Google Analytics integration. Now you can drop your Web Property ID into Guestlist and gain access to all of the valuable visitor data you need.

Adding it is easy. Click “+ Add new profile” in your Google Analytics account and create a profile for the domain http://guestlistapp.com

Next, take the new Web Property ID (the code that looks like UA-12345678-9) and drop it into the Google Analytics pane in your Guestlist event settings.

That’s it! In a few hours the first visitor data will start showing up in your Google Analytics account.

We’ve just released our first take on coupon codes. This was one of our most commonly requested features so we are excited to see how people will make use of it.

As usual we’ve built a simple but flexible implementation that should accomodate a wide variety of use cases. We currently support percentage and fixed value discounts.

We have also thrown in a handy Generate Random Code button that will add a new coupon based on the last coupon created, and assign it a random code. This lets you quickly and easily generate a whole batch of coupons.

Up next we will be spending some time polishing interface elements and investing in performance improvements.

Now that the Rails 3 upgrade is behind us we can get back to iterating upon our user experience and feature set. There is still much that can be done to improve it and the most obvious case of this was probably the ticket types dialog.

Ticket descriptions

We noticed that a lot of people where cramming quite a bit information into the ticket name so we added a ticket description field.

The ticket description is the perfect place to put any qualifiers or clarifications that you may have regarding the ticket. Things like bonuses you get from buying this ticket or special requirements you may need.

The infamous Qty column

Other than PayPal, our biggest topic for support questions has been the ticket type dialog. There was a lot confusion as to what the Qty column was referring to. We had intended for it to indicate the number of tickets available for sale, but many people interpreted this as the number of tickets available per order. So some event hosts put a 1 or a 2 here and then became confused when their event sold out after only one sale.

Well, no more! We’ve renamed it “# to Sell” which is much clearer and also added a “# Sold” column as well.

Ticket statuses

Stopping sales on a particular ticket type used to be more difficult than it should have. One had to reduce the Qty field to below the amount already sold which, by the way, was also not so easy to find out. We’ve cleaned this up nicely by adding a status which can take one of three values:

Selling This is the default and behaves as you would expect. Tickets will be available for sale until the # to Sell equals # Sold.

Sold Out When a ticket type is marked as “Sold Out” we cut off sales and display it identically to actually sold out types on the public event page, regardless of how many tickets are remaining. This is good for hiding early bird tickets after the deadline has passed.

Hidden Hidden cuts off sales and completely hides the ticket type from the public event page. This is useful if you need to keep some of the ticket types for special use such as sponsorships or if you have made a price change that you do not want to be publicly visible.

Custom fields

And so much more…

We also fixed a myriad of small issues such as disabled dropdowns not looking disabled (they do now!) and the Guestlist fee dropdown being hard to understand (so hard in fact that we were frequently confused ourselves).

These are all minor changes but we feel it is important to address small points of confusion if you want to build a really solid user experience.