Proposal: CampTix Attendee to Google Sheets integration

As a WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. organizer, I would like to see CampTix Attendee data populate in a Google Sheet instead of only being available as a downloadable CSV file. This would allow organizers to make a live set of data available for their needs including but not limited to on-demand badge printing.

Integration with on-demand badge printing solutions

I am an organizer of WordCamp US 2022 and am posting this during contributor dayContributor Day Contributor Days are standalone days, frequently held before or after WordCamps but they can also happen at any time. They are events where people get together to work on various areas of https://make.wordpress.org/ There are many teams that people can participate in, each with a different focus. https://2017.us.wordcamp.org/contributor-day/ https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/getting-started/getting-started-at-a-contributor-day/.. Over the last 3 days, I observed the process we had in place between WCUSWCUS WordCamp US. The US flagship WordCamp event. and the vendor we used to print our badges.

• About two weeks before the event, a CampTix export was created.
• Unnecessary columns in the export were removed leaving only the columns the vendor needed: name, pronouns, company, Twitter handle, and ticket type (attendee, sponsor, speaker, media, volunteer, organizer).
• A review of the export was performed, by hand, and removed characters that the vendor couldn’t print (leaving only UTF-8 characters).
• About one week before the event, the modified export was sent to the badge vendor.
• The badge vendor uploaded our CSV file to Google Drive, and mapped the various columns to positions where text would appear on the badge.

Due to last minute changes to ticket details, the export from two weeks before the event was stale in a few cases:

• Attendees that update their ticket information (name change, company change etc.) caused old information to still appear on the badge.
• Attendees that refunded their ticket still had a badge available to be printed.
• Attendees who purchased an available (recently refunded) ticket weren’t able to print their badge.

A manual process was necessary to update incorrect information, or add missing people to the vendor’s Google Sheet.

Organizers only need to create an “export” once

Over the course of planning a WordCamp, I find I am often pulling a fresh CampTix export. For the same reasons that I spelled out in the section above, an export becomes increasingly less valuable as time passes. While the CampTix Summarize tool is useful when looking for a count of attendees and how they answered a particular question, sometimes more specific information is needed. For example, it’s useful to see the attendee’s name and their answer, especially in the case of:

• Microsponsors
• T-shirt sizes
• Life-threatening allergies
• AccessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) needs

For me, the export CSV file isn’t usable until I open it in a spreadsheet application and I don’t have one installed on my computer. So, I end up uploading the file into my WordCamp’s Google Drive and open the file with Google Sheets before I can begin working with it. It would simplify the workflow by having the data immediately available in Google Sheets.

Integration Proposal

We already allow a non-logged user to access CampTix data through the Attendance UIUI UI is an acronym for User Interface - the layout of the page the user interacts with. Think ‘how are they doing that’ and less about what they are doing.. This proposal adds a new tab on the screen below called Export Integration. It would have a radio field titled Enabled and a text area field titled Secret Link similar to the screenshot.

Once the Secret Link from the Export Integration is generated, it should be embedded inside the Google Sheets function IMPORTDATA() which would populate the sheet. If there are multiple use cases for Google Sheet integrations, additional Google Sheet files can be created that invoke the IMPORTRANGE() function. If only a select number of columns or rows are needed for a particular use case, the limited access use case could be wrapped by a QUERY(). Here’s an example that might make sense for the microsponsor scenario:
=QUERY(IMPORTRANGE("1gcuSqpN-x1NCn5ZaEKc_IhoBFQAlMhpjtjE1eUL4ZJo"),
"SELECT C, D, E WHERE B='Microsponsor'", FALSE)

Feedback

I’m seeking feedback on this proposal through the end of September. Please let me know if you have any questions or need clarification.

Thanks to @newyorkerlaura, @katiejrichards, and @jyoansah for their help editing this post.

#camptix, #contributor-day, #proposal, #wcus