This topic was raised during the WordCamp Europe 2025 Q&A session, where I highlighted the growing limitations of the CampTix plugin. In response, Matt Mullenweg expressed support for exploring improvements to the tool and encouraged us to take steps toward making CampTix more effective for WordCamp organizers and attendees.
Overview
CampTix is the official WordCamp ticketing plugin used for events across the WordPress ecosystem, including WordCamp Europe (WCEU). While it has served the community for years, its capabilities have not kept pace with the evolving needs of organizers or the scale of flagship events. As a long-time organizer involved in WCEU for over 9 years, I believe it’s time to prioritize improvements to CampTix to ensure it remains a reliable, central tool not just a payment gateway. Yes we use it mainly as a payment gateway.
This proposal aims to:
- Raise awareness of the current limitations of CampTix.
- Highlight use cases and pain points shared by many event teams.
- Suggest practical short-term wins and long-term improvements.
- Open a conversation around how we can collaboratively move the project forward.
What Is CampTix?
CampTix is a WordPress plugin designed to handle ticketing for WordCamp events. It enables attendees to purchase tickets, organizers to collect information, and teams to manage event registration and invoicing. It is released as open-source software.
Documentation:
Why This Matters
CampTix is a core part of the WordCamp infrastructure, but its current feature set and development support are limiting its usefulness:
- Many flagship and small WordCamps have turned to third-party tools (e.g., Eventora, Tito, Eventbrite) for attendee management, while using CampTix only for payments.
- Organizers rely on manual spreadsheets, custom workflows, and one-off hacks to manage data that could and should be part of CampTix.
- Features like visa letters, check-in tools, reports, and attendee role management are either missing, hard to use, or entirely externalized.
- Data Protection: Currently anyone with Administrator access to a WordCamp website has the ability to download all ticket information which includes (but not limited to) names, nationalities, email addresses and confidential items such as dietary requirements, allergies and any custom fields added to the registration form.
This CSV file can be downloaded anytime from current and previous WordCamp editions where users are still listed as Administrators, and could therefore breach privacy regulations (such as GDPR, CCPA).
We are missing a huge opportunity to improve efficiency, consistency, and data quality across events.
Common Challenges for Organizers
These are challenges echoed by many organizing teams over the years:
- Visa Letters: No built-in option; handled manually or through third-party tools.
- Reporting: No way to generate comprehensive reports during or after the event (e.g., demographics, ticket types, attendance breakdown, swag/T-Shirt sizing, catering requirements).
- Attendee Management: Limited options for updating or assigning roles, checking in, filtering by ticket types, or seeing complete user history.
- Shortcodes: Cannot filter specific ticket types for events like Contributor Day, Social Dinner, or Workshops.
- Bulk Ticket Issues: Bugs when multiple tickets are purchased under one order but need to be edited individually.
- Data In/Out: Poor integration with WordPress.org accounts and no real data liberation. Tickets require a WordPress.org login, but the system doesn’t leverage or connect that data usefully.
- Partial Refunds: Currently only full refunds are possible where a user purchases more than one ticket, resulting in having to re-purchase tickets again – this is a poor customer experience.
- Payments: A number of additional gateways have been added as ‘standalone plugins’ to support various payment providers (countries where Stripe or PayPal is not common or supported), and most of these individual plugins are no longer maintained.
Why We Should Act Now
The plugin has no roadmap, active maintainer, or visible plan for growth. Yet CampTix remains a required component for WordCamps. If left stagnant, more events will abandon it entirely, fragmenting the ecosystem and increasing the workload for volunteers.
This is not a complaint, it’s a call to action.
Proposal
1. Short-Term Improvements (“Quick Wins”)
- Add Visa Letter generation, similar to how invoices are generated.
- Fix known bugs with bulk tickets and editing tickets associated with unknown email addresses.
- Extend shortcodes to allow filtering by ticket type (Contributor Day, Social Dinner, etc.).
2. Long-Term Improvements (Roadmap)
- Partial Refunds: Allow for per-ticket or percentage-based refunds.
- Data Liberation & API Access: Create an open, privacy-conscious method to import/export data for organizers.
- WordPress.org Integration: Bidirectional sync with WordPress.org profiles (attendee history, contributor badges, etc.).
- Better Reporting Tools: Dynamic reports that don’t require exporting to spreadsheets.
- Organizer Sandbox Environment: Provide a sandbox/demo version of CampTix for testing and training.
- Modular Roles: Assign roles (attendee, speaker, sponsor) from within CampTix, with better UX.
- Better Permissions for Organisers: Only Administrators can edit specific areas (e.g. budget) but are automatically given access to all functions (speakers, sponsors etc) which is not appropriate for their role.
- Improved API: Enable external tools and dashboards to interact with CampTix programmatically.
How We Can Make Progress
We understand that resources are limited and that there is currently no dedicated maintainer for CampTix. However, that should not block community contribution.
Here are some suggested approaches:
- Appoint a Dedicated Maintainer or Gatekeeper
- Someone with access to review PRs and deploy updates.
- Open Access to Contributors
- Provide a sandbox or mirror repository for the community to submit improvements, roadmaps, and test features.
- Form a Community Working Group
- Contributors from different WordCamps (WCEU, WCUS, WCAsia, local camps) can collaborate to identify and prioritize improvements.
- Opportunity to have a specific dedicated table at Contributor Days at flagship events to proceed with further developments, onboard new contributors, etc
- Transparent Roadmap
- Use GitHub Projects or a Make blog post series to share upcoming changes, bugs, and ideas.
Closing Thoughts
CampTix deserves more attention not only because it’s central to WordCamp organization, but because it reflects how we as a community build tools for ourselves.
Let’s invest in it.
I am personally committed to:
- Contributing to development and testing.
- Engaging other organizers to identify priorities.
- Helping build a roadmap with the Community Team.
Let’s stop reinventing the wheel for every WordCamp. Let’s make CampTix better together.