Muttmates Events

What the Events module adds

Muttmates Core is the spine of your back office: clients and dogs, the diary, prices, payment links, receipts, reminders, emails and settings. This manual covers only what the Events module adds on top, so if you have not read the Muttmates Core owner's manual, start with that.

Events is for things anyone can come to — an open day, a puppy social, a talk, a photo day, a fundraiser walk — booked by the person, with a dog or without one. It adds:

• The event itself: a date, a venue, a capacity and a ticket price (or free), on the diary like any other session.
• A public face: a name, a picture and a few lines for the card, or Don't list to keep it off the public page while still bookable by a direct link.
• The What's on page: every event still to come, as a card, for anyone to see and book — with the code to put it on your own website.

Events is available on every plan. If it is installed but not on your plan, you get one quiet line about it under Settings → Plan and nothing else — no banner, and no data touched.

Your Events page

Your services → Events in the rail opens the page. It's the same plain dashboard every group-session module gets: four tiles — Today, Next 14 days, Owing on these, This month — then Coming up, and Needs marking off for anything past that's still open. Beside the heading sit + New event and Weekly patterns.

The tab row:

The side column also carries On your website — the link to your public What's on page, the embed snippet, and the shortcode, all in one place (see below).

An event is a group session, booked by the person

Under the hood an event is the same kind of thing as a walk or a training day — a Core group session — with one difference: the row on it is a person, their dog optional, so someone can come along without one and still take up a place. Everything that already works for a group session — the diary, Today, reminders, payment links, receipts, credit, statements — works on an event unchanged, and online booking offers a place the same way it offers a walk or a class, asking "Bringing a dog?" with a "Just me" option.

Setting up what you offer

An event's own service is set up under Services & prices — three are seeded for you the first time the module runs: Open day (free, 120 minutes), Puppy social ($10, 60 minutes), and Talk ($15, 90 minutes). Change the names, prices and lengths to yours, and add more for whatever else you run. Events sit on premises — the venue itself is a field on the event, not the service (see below).

Creating an event, and events that repeat

+ New event asks for the usual group-session fields — what, when, capacity (20 by default), the service, and Venue, which goes into every confirmation and reminder. A one-off event is just that: create it, and it's on the diary.

For something that comes round again — a monthly social, say — use Regular events instead: the same weekly-pattern mechanism that powers Walking's and Day training's rounds, so the dates create themselves. New regular event starts one that repeats; leave it open-ended and it rolls on, or give it an end date to make a fixed run all at once.

The title that writes itself

An event's own title on the diary isn't something you type — it's built for you: "Open day · Sat 3 Oct, 10:00 am · 12 people", the card's name first, then the date and time, then how many are coming. It refreshes automatically whenever the event's box is saved, and again the moment someone books or drops off, so the count is always current without you touching it.

The card on your What's on page

Every event carries a box, On the What's on page, with what the public actually sees:

On the public page, each card shows the picture (or the coloured initial), the name, when and where, the fee or Free, and a pill for how full it is — Full, Last place, a small number left, or a plain places count when there's plenty of room. Underneath sits Book a place where online booking is switched on for that event, or Enquire when it isn't; a full event offers Join the waiting list instead — which is simply the ordinary enquiry form relabelled, not an automatic waitlist like Day training's, so a place that frees up doesn't fill itself and you'll need to follow up by hand.

Putting it on your own website

The What's on page itself lives at /events on your own site, and shows every event that's coming (and, if you also run Training, every course and class too — one page for all of it). The On your website card gives you three ways to use it: a plain link to share anywhere, an embed snippet — an iframe that sizes itself to fit, for pasting into your own site's code — and, for a page on this same WordPress site, the shortcode [mm_events] does the same job without the snippet.

Settings and set-up reference

When something goes wrong

An event isn't showing on the What's on page. Check it isn't ticked Don't list — a hidden event can still be booked by its direct link, it just won't appear as a card. A past event also drops off the page on its own.

The card shows the wrong name, no picture, or the wrong blurb. The event's own "On the What's on page" box overrides the service — check what's typed there. A blank field falls back to the service's own name or description, and a blank picture shows the name's initial on your accent colour instead of an image.

The diary title looks stale — the number of people hasn't updated. It's meant to refresh itself whenever the event is saved or the roster changes; open the event and save it again if it still looks wrong.

There's no Book a place button on a card. Either online booking is off for the site, or it isn't switched on for that event's own service — an Enquire button shows in its place.

A card says "Join the waiting list." The event's places are full. That link is the ordinary enquiry form, not a tracked waitlist — nobody is booked automatically when a place frees up, so follow up with whoever's enquired by hand.