SNN Tickets #10 in Events & Booking

WordPress plugin for event ticket generation, management, and validation with QR codes, batch email invitations, and public scanning capabilities.

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🎫 Features

Registration forms

• Visual form builder — drag to reorder fields, edit them inline, and watch a live preview update as you go
• Field types — text, email, phone, number, date, paragraph, dropdown, radio, checkboxes, consent checkbox, hidden
• Automatic ticket list — saving a new form creates a ticket list named after it; pick an existing list only if you want the form to feed one you already have
• Field mapping — point one field at the ticket holder's name and one at their email; everything else is stored as custom answers
• Shortcode — drop a form on any page with [snn_ticket_form id="1"]
• Capacity limits — cap registrations per form and show a "fully booked" message once it fills
• One per email — optionally block a second registration from the same address
• Spam protection — honeypot field, minimum fill time, and a per-IP submission throttle

Approval logic

Every form decides for itself what happens on submit:

• Issue a ticket automatically — every submission gets a ticket, and the confirmation email carries its QR code
• Hold for review — the submitter gets the plain confirmation email; the ticket follows when you approve from the Submissions screen
• Decide by rules — auto-approve only when the answers match, with the rest held or rejected

Rules run against any field, with operators for is exactly, is not, contains, starts with, is empty, is not empty, is checked, is not checked, email domain is, and is one of. Match on all rules or any, and choose whether a non-match is held for review or rejected outright.

Submissions

• Review screen with pending / approved / rejected tabs, filtered by form
• Approve, reject, resend or delete — one at a time or in bulk
• Every custom answer stored and viewable per submission
• CSV export of submissions with all custom fields
• Permanent delete removes the submission, its ticket, and its queued mail (GDPR erasure)

QR codes, generated in PHP

• No browser needed — QR codes are rendered on the server, so a form submitted at 3am still gets its ticket
• No dependencies — pure PHP, using GD when it is available and a built-in PNG encoder when it is not
• Signed URLs — each QR encodes a URL carrying an HMAC signature, so any phone camera opens your scan page and forged codes are rejected
• Unguessable filenames — cached PNGs are named by hash, so the QR directory cannot be enumerated
• Automatic sizing — the QR version is chosen to fit the payload rather than being fixed

Email

• Server-side queue — sending runs on WP-Cron in the background; close the tab and it keeps going
• Rate limited — set how many messages go out per minute to stay inside your host's limits
• Retries — failed sends are retried up to three times, with the error recorded
• Inline QR — the QR is attached to the message rather than hotlinked, so it renders even when a client blocks remote images
• Confirmation on every submission — held registrations get the plain confirmation email; approved ones get the ticket email with the QR code embedded
• Per-form wording — edit the confirmation and ticket subject and body right in the form builder, no template needed; blank falls back to the selected template, then the built-in default
• Three template roles — ticket, submission confirmation, and rejection, each selectable per form
• Placeholders — {name}, {email}, {ticket}, {qr_inline}, {qr}, {scan_url}, {list}, {form}, {site}, {date}, and {field:key} for any form field
• Queue monitor — pending / sent / failed counts, per-message errors, retry and process-now controls

Tickets

• Manual and bulk ticket generation with unique codes
• CSV import with a downloadable template
• Ticket lists with inline editing of name and email
• Per-ticket QR preview and one-click ticket email
• Batch email for a whole list, skipping anyone already sent

Scanning & validation

• Public scan page via [tickets_scan_page], using BarcodeDetector where available and jsQR elsewhere
• Camera or manual entry — pasted scan URLs are accepted as well as bare codes
• Repeat scans flagged — an already-scanned ticket is shown as a warning, not a silent pass
• Rate limited — the public endpoint throttles per IP, and unsigned lookups never increment the scan count, so codes cannot be enumerated or burned through

Dashboard

• Lists, tickets, validations, forms, submissions awaiting review, and mail queue at a glance
• System check for GD/zlib availability, cron health, and the signing key

Getting started

1. Set the scan page — put [tickets_scan_page] on a page, then paste its URL into Tickets → Settings so QR codes point at it
2. Build a form — Tickets → Forms → Add New, arrange the fields, and choose how submissions are approved. Saving it creates the matching ticket list for you; you can also make lists by hand under Tickets → Tickets Generator or import one from CSV
3. Write the emails — the form builder's Emails panel holds the confirmation and ticket messages, with tags like {name} and {qr_inline}
4. Publish it — paste the form's shortcode onto any page
5. Watch it work — submissions land in Tickets → Submissions, tickets go out through Tickets → Mail Queue

Cron

Sending relies on WP-Cron. If your site sets DISABLE_WP_CRON, point a real cron job at wp-cron.php; the Settings page will tell you if this needs attention. You can always press Process now on the Mail Queue screen.

Tests

The plugin ships with two standalone test suites that need only PHP — no WordPress install:

php tests/qr-test.php      # QR encoder: full round-trip decode, all 40 versions x 4 EC levels
php tests/logic-test.php   # signatures, placeholders, field sanitising, approval rules

qr-test.php re-derives the GF(256) arithmetic, function-module map and format-info decoder from the spec, then decodes every generated matrix back to its payload and checks that the Reed-Solomon syndromes vanish — so a bug in the encoder cannot cancel itself out.

Requirements

• WordPress 5.8+
• PHP 8.1+
• zlib or GD (almost always present; the plugin uses whichever it finds)