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If you have ever created or managed an online event for any purpose, you know that things can get tricky sometimes. Whether you hold a webinar, online course, business networking session, or any other event, you should be equipped with the most appropriate tools so that you will be able to manage everything competently.
Thanks to the advantages of WordPress CMS, owning a website is no longer rocket science, and users can start their website without any knowledge of web programming. Fortunately, the same conditions apply to online WordPress event submission and management with the help of the Modern Events Calendar plugin.
Today, we will discuss MEC, the best WordPress event calendar plugin with practical and professional features. This plugin lets you turn the front end of your WordPress website into a thorough event management system to maximize your online event management.
Without further ado, let’s get down to the review of the Modern Events Calendar.
About Modern Events Calendar Plugin
The Modern Events Calendar plugin is published by the Webnus team, with over seven years of successful experience developing WordPress themes and plugins. The team members have done their best to create the best event calendar with a world of practical features.
This innovative WordPress plugin looks highly stylish and modern since it follows the latest global trends in UX/UI designs. It comes in two plans: free and premium. The free version will probably suffice if you are a beginner user or don’t need special features for your event management experience. Surprisingly, most of the premium capabilities of similar tools, such as EventOn, are free with Modern Events Calendar Lite.
On the other side, upgrading to the Pro version opens the door to numerous professional tools for creating and managing events if you need further capabilities and features. Additionally, you can benefit from more than ten practical add-ons programmed to increase the plugin’s functionality in more specific areas, like generating advanced, in-depth reports.
To better understand this difference, look at the following comparison, which includes both Lite and Pro versions.
This great advantage can also be noticed when examining its performance on WordPress.org. The number of users who have installed MEC skyrocketed in less than two years, and it currently has over 60,000 active installations.
The following introductory video shows MEC’s general appearance and performance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjRVKIwD5jY
Creating events with MEC in WordPress
Whether you plan a single event or hold regular and recurring ones at specific intervals, the Modern Events Calendar plugin can provide the best experience. The available options make creating events easy and let your audience know the most minor details about them. Adding hourly plans to each event, descriptions about the event organizer, and locations can help people better understand your activity before attending the event.
Repeated events can be scheduled once and displayed automatically on the specified dates without further customizations. This can be extremely helpful for larger businesses that hold many events since they don’t have to worry about them every time the event is supposed to be held.
Moreover, you can add tags, colors, labels, and other details to every event to make your event schedules appear more organized. Event sharing has likewise become more convenient since you can use QR codes to share your events with others in addition to the standard social sharing buttons.
Watch this tutorial video that takes you through the MEC event creation and single event page experience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhjw6Tl1gTA
Displaying events with MEC
No matter how valuable and important events you hold, how you promote them can dramatically increase or decrease the number of attendees you see. Different views, such as lists, grids, sliders, countdowns, carousels, and timetables, all have advantages and disadvantages when displaying events on a site. Therefore, using a single view for all events in all website sections is not wise.
For example, the way you promote an event abroad is a different ball of wax compared to an online class. An international business event should convey a different message to people than what a group of young learners should see for their online course.
Fortunately, MEC has a complete set of display options that can be used in all parts of a website with different sizes. MEC’s neat and modern layouts increase user engagement, increasing overall positive results.
The view options are compatible with widely used WordPress page builders like Elementor, WP Bakery, and Divi. This means that you can personalize templates further and make everything more appealing. Also, all the elements of this plugin have a responsive design and profoundly adapt to different screen sizes, which can be translated into other languages, too. The plugin is also SEO-friendly for your site.
Booking feature of MEC
The booking feature in the event management plugin is available in the Pro version. Activating this option allows users to make reservations/ ticket sales and pay the fees in advance rather than paying locally on the event day. The developer team has included all the standard payment gateways, such as PayPal and Stripe, in the plugin to provide a better experience when purchasing tickets.
You can even use tailor-made tickets, booking fields, and confirmation emails to leave a better impression on participants who will attend the event.
Integration of Modern Event Calendar with other tools
Whether you want to start event management all from the beginning or replace your current plugin with MEC, everything is already in place for you. You can easily import the existing data from other WordPress plugins into MEC without any concerns about losing data in just a few clicks.
Facebook events have also become popular in recent years, and some business owners use them for their activities. The Modern Events Calendar can be easily integrated with your Facebook account to synchronize data between your site and Facebook. Similarly, you can add your Google Calendar and Meetup accounts and turn your WordPress site into an integrated event management platform.
Email marketing is an integral part of any business, and many use this potential through leading platforms such as MailChimp. If that is the case for you, rest assured, as MEC can also be integrated with this platform.
The professional add-ons of MEC
As earlier pointed out, the developer team has published various add-ons that enhance MEC’s features. Here is a quick overview of these options.
WooCommerce add-on
The WooCommerce add-on gives users a better online purchase experience. It adds your tickets as a separate product in the WooCommerce cart to avoid entering bank account information repeatedly. Users will pay for the tickets simultaneously with other products or services they want to buy from your site.
Elementor add-ons
Modern Events Calendar is an Elementor-based product that allows you to make customized pages conveniently. Six add-ons enhance the user experience by providing additional Elementor features. You can create shortcodes, customize elements with a drag-and-drop interface, and more.
Multisite Event Sync
If you own multiple websites, you can share an event from one site and display it on others simultaneously using the Multisite Event Sync add-on. No matter how many sites you want your events displayed on, they all inherit changes from the primary site, so you won’t have to edit them individually.
Event API
APIs can be used in many ways for web development. The Event API add-on, as the title suggests, creates an API for every event that can be copied on other websites that don’t have the MEC plugin. Therefore, you can display your events on different sites with no concerns regarding the possible changes in details.
User Dashboard
You may have seen prominent websites with more than one author and editor managing the content. The User Dashboard add-on allows website managers to limit users’ access to events and enable them to make changes according to the permissions granted.
Advanced Map
Nowadays, people use maps to find information about locations or to navigate to other places. Considering the popularity of this technology, the Advanced Map add-on is developed to activate OpenStreetMap instead of the standard Google Maps. This enables users to enjoy better features and even apply filters to their maps.
Ticket and Invoice
Personalized tickets can convey your friendlier personality to attendees. The Ticket and Invoice add-on allows you to create and sell tickets and invoices alongside custom-made emails and has additional controls over users’ invoices.
Advanced Reports
The Advanced Reports add-on suits sites that hold regular events and need to keep track of the number of attendees and revenues. It generates a variety of in-depth reports that can be simplified using filters. You can compare your data and make reports in different formats, such as JSON, CSV, and XML.
Fluent-view Layouts (FREE)
As we mentioned earlier, the Modern Event Calendar plugin has eye-catching designs of elements by default. The Fluent View Layouts add-on installs a new series of stylish view layouts on your event management tool. These designs are published according to the latest global trends and are available for free.
Pricing plans of MEC
The Modern Events Calendar is a budget-priced product that brings useful features to your site. If you need a premium plan, a single license will cost you no more than $75. The premium licenses have lifetime updates and a year of full support from the developer team. All plans come with support team help for any issues you may encounter. There are also FAQs and online forums to help you.
Like other products, you can purchase add-ons at a low price. For example, the WooCommerce integration add-on is available for $35. You can check out the packages and prices on the MEC purchase page and use it today.
Conclusion: Modern Events Calendar
Online event management can be an easy and pleasant experience if done correctly. This review introduced the best WordPress event calendar to manage your events conveniently and efficiently. Stay ahead of the competition and turn your event management into a pleasant experience by immediately installing this plugin.