Summary
Modern Events Calendar (MEC) is a powerful and minimalist plugin for publishing events on a WordPress website as easily as possible without the need to know how to write one line of code. MEC Calendar remains one of the few best WordPress event Calendars based plugins to offer a lifetime plan and enough features and customizations options to help you create a complete event system for your website even on its free lite version.
As customer experience is utmost and it gives us an idea of the product, we would like to cover some of MEC most popular features and addons in this article. This will give you a short and sweet yet informative review of this popular plugin to help you make a wiser choice in the pursuit of finding the most efficient and economical option for your website.
- Pros:
There is more than enough to create events on the free version.
You’ll get your money’s worth with a lifetime support.
Beautiful and minimalistic design.
Various customization options. - Cons:
You need to pay for its addons separately from the plugin.
MEC Features
As mentioned above, the free version of the plugin is more than enough if you are interested in creating a minimalist calendar to promote events on your website. However, In addition to the MEC Lite options, like various shortcodes, widgets, search options and countdowns, you can also use MEC Pro booking options if you’d like to sell event tickets on your calendar. MEC Cart, booking limits, booking notification, gateway options and discount coupons are a few features of this wonderful plugin that have been chosen to provide more details alongside the free options here:
- Date and time
As date and time setting must be considered a big part of any calendar plugin, MEC Calendar has made sure to offers extensive options for setting the date and time of your events like countdowns, local time settings and various time formats. In addition to the single events you can create, there are options for recurring events that repeat on an hourly, daily, weekly, etc. basis, and with the variety of its flexible options available MEC makes it very easy to find a pattern that suits your schedule. There are also frontend options for your users to add dates to your event forms in case you want your customers to add their birthday or other dates to the their booking form.
- Custom Codes
As stated earlier there is no need to know coding to set up your MEC Calendar. However, if you are an advanced website designer there are no limits. In order to customize CSS styles, optimize your website for search engines or improve SEO, you can add the codes in the WP dashboard. Keep in mind that the codes that you put in this section will not be lost after updates. It is also possible to contact MEC support to create a tailor-made CSS code for your website if you submit a feature request.
- Payment gateways
As mentioned before, you can sell your events only on MEC Pro and there are quite a few options to choose your desired gateway, even add a cart needless of purchasing any extra addons. However, when it comes to adding more options, WooCommerce Integration addon can come in handy and allow you to sell products as well as tickets. You can also set QR codes to make the process more convenient for your customers.
- Customization
Although there is a lot to say about MEC’s Elementor addons customization possibilities, MEC won’t leave you empty-handed with the many shortcodes and options available to change colors, skins and views and get creative with the look of your events to make them your own. There are more than 30 views, colors, and shortcodes, which I advise you to check out on their website here: “live link”
- Google maps
You can add your events’ location to the Calendar and even add pictures of the venue for your customers to be able to find their location more easily and quickly. However, there are more possibilities with MEC addons, like Advanced Map that can display the closest events to your customers based on their location, or customize your map for more detailed and precise filtering options.
- Email notifications
You can notify your customers of their booking, booking cancelation, and also send notifications to them before the event starts. Of course, all the options mentioned and the text sent to the customers is adjustable via the booking options on MEC calendar to help you have a closer connection with your customers.
- Frontend access
Frontend submission is easily one of Mec’s best tools to add a little bit of flexibility to your website and make it simpler by getting rid of all the unnecessary backend process. This feature allows you to create static lists and get your users’ data without the need to create an account for booking. In order to create the static lists you can simply add shortcodes to your frontend settings and publish them on your frontend.
MEC Addons
If the booking features and customization options mentioned for MEC Pro don’t suffice, you can simply enhance the plugin using its many easy to use addons like elementor, woocommerce integration and buddyboss to mention a few. There is not enough time to go over the 30+ addons on our website, so we’ll cover only a few of them and leave the rest for you to check out on their website Here
- Advanced Reports addon
This addon can make a list of of all the reservations made by customers in the backend of your website. You can also filter their reservations based on date, categories, Event names, Organizers and Places. There are also two diagrams in which this addon analyzes your income based on the payments and statistics, last but not least it makes exporting possible in CSV, JSON and, XML formats.
- Elementor Integration addon
Elementor Shortcode Designer, Single Builder, and Form Builder are the three Elementor addons that can help you customize events and forms as easily as possible. Their visual platform can help you create shortcodes and pages without the need to know any coding or advanced techniques. Simply change colors, sizes, or designs to unleash your creativity and make your customers feel at home.
- Ticket and Invoice addon
This awesome addon helps you sell events, manage your attendees’ check-in, and send out tickets and invoices via email in print and PDF modes. You can also use QR codes for the check-in using QR code scanners and manage payments without any third party websites.
- User Dashboard addon
It is common for online businesses to want their customers register before purchasing tickets. User Dashboard will create a special page for each customer and enables them to log in before purchasing their ticket. It also allows you to Check your booked ticket’s status, download your invoice, and edit the event.
- BuddyBoss Integration Addon
This is a BuddyBoss integration to help you assign events to groups where each group can have its own events. Members of the group can submit events and post them within their groups. BuddyBoss can also be helpful for creating forums to provide a more interactive website for your customers.
- Last but not least
The development of more addons and features is still ongoing and the addons and features mentioned are only the popular options available as of yet. You can get updated on their future products on their own website .
