Ohanah: Easy Event Management and Ticketing with Joomla

You cannot go wrong by embracing the cloud for your business or personal use. Web apps save a ton of money on infrastructure and maintenance charges by charging a relatively miniscule, recurring monthly fee. Depending on how tech savvy you are, you can save a ton money by self hosting apps in your own servers. That way, you get to escape the recurring subscription charges.

However, not all SaaS apps charge a flat monthly subscription fee. In certain verticals, these apps take a cut of the revenue generated. Event organization and ticket sales vertical squarely falls into that category. Easily 5% of the proceeds has to be shared with the ticketing platform provider. That definitely isn’t loose change.

Ohanah targets event organizers who don’t want to part with a percentage of their revenue. That’s awesome. But, is that the only silver lining of Ohanah? Let’s find out!

The Important Stuff

Ohanah isn’t a traditional LAMP stack app. It’s a Joomla plugin and you’ll need a working installation of Joomla installed in your servers – which isn’t a hard task to begin with. It just amazes me how developers are pushing the limits of CMS solutions like WordPress and Joomla with innovative web app like creations of their own.

On the downside, unlike a traditional self hosted solutions, plugins that run on top of WordPress and Joomla are seriously limited by the constraints of a CMS. And, there are always a ton of dependencies to watch out. A new theme, a point upgrade of the core, other plugins – your installation might not work for any number of reasons. So, that’s something you should keep in mind before jumping the gun with these super sized apps.

Now that I have satisfactorily delivered the disclaimer, it’s time to discuss pricing information. With just 29 Euro (one time fee), you can start cashing in on your events. The starter plan allows you to host the app in only one domain and offers a limited window for free updates. Higher priced plans don’t have such limitations.

Venues and Categories

I spent a good couple of minutes ogling at the homepage. It’s so cool! The dashboard wasn’t as much cool but is significantly redesigned to look like a traditional web app rather than a Joomla plugin.

Before creating events, there are two important things to consider – venues and categories. When you are hosting events at many different venues and targeting different audiences, these features will be of great help from the organization perspective.

It doesn’t take much effort to create multiple venues. For better clarity, you can upload multiple images of the venue and a detailed Google Map complete with a pin on the exact venue. With equal ease, you can create categories as well. Not sure about purpose they serve, but, you can attach multiple images to each category as well.

Creating an Event

It’s a quick and painless process which involves filling up a form. All standard details are covered and if need be, you can add additional information using custom fields. A WYSIWYG editor is there to paint a word picture of the event in detail.

The critical ticket details section of the event is comprehensive and lets you charge the attendees in tiers of your choice. Paypal integration is readily available. For alternative payment methods, Ohanah allows you to redirect users to a custom payment processing page that you specify.

Nailing the backend is the tough part when it comes to supersized plugin apps. Ohanah passed that test with flying colors. Events can either be hosted in your website or you can opt for a custom domain as well. It blends with the markup of the theme you are using so that the design doesn’t look out of place.

And, the best part is, the app comes with custom elements for two largest Joomla theme providers – Yoothemes and Rocket Themes. Meaning, skinning your buttons can easily be done by picking the theme provider from a drop down menu. Neat!

Final Thoughts

I felt really comfortable using Ohanah. The interface was simple and the workflow was refined. Talking about the interface, the dev team has paid a lot of attention to make Ohanah look like a standard web app. During my evaluation, I never once got the feel that I am navigating inside Joomla (not a big fan, love WordPress though!).

Ohanah is powerful enough to compete against the competition and has got some cool new features as well. Recurring events is a feature that I don’t think many SaaS alternatives in this field provide. Without doubt this is one of the best supersized plugin apps I have come across so far!

Unless you don’t want to get your hands dirty setting up and maintaining a server, there absolutely is no reason for you to lose 5% of your hard earned money!