Setting up your online raffle and lottery with the Raffle Ticket Generator

When you purchase the Gold or Silver edition, you will receive the download link and serial number. All of our versions are different plugin files. So in order to use your purchased version, you must first uninstall the Free or Bronze version. DO NOT INSTALL THE PAID PLUGIN WITH THE FREE PLUGIN INSTALLED.

Once you upload the Raffle Ticket Generator plugin and activate it within WordPress, you will then need to activate the license.
From the plugin section of wordpress you will see a screen like this. On the top, click the link to activate your Raffle Ticket Generator license as shown:

Enter the license key you received in your order confirmation email.

Our plugin communicates with our license server. If you need to move the license from a development or test server to your live environment, you can login to your account at http://online.wpraffle.com/my-account/ and deactivate it on the old server and that will free up your license to be able to be activated on the new server.

We also offer a test/dev license as an add-on option at the time of purchase or you can get one for $25 by contacting support@wpraffle.com

Setting up your online raffle:

Once you have installed and activated the Gold or Silver version, you will need to setup the Raffle.
The Raffle Ticket Generator uses product categories to hold the configuration settings for each raffle. Our Gold and Silver versions, allow you to setup an infinite number of raffles. Simple create a woocommerce category for each raffle and designate the category for a raffle category using the checkbox “Make this Category as Raffle Category” If this checkbox is not ticked, or plugin will ignore the category settings.

Once the Raffle Category has been created in woocommerce, you can configure the various options for your raffle. One the left hand dashboard menu, there is a Raffle Ticket Generator menu and it will bring up the various categories from woocommerce.
Click on the title of the category will bring up the configuration screen:

Here is an explanation of the various category settings and the options:

Setting up the online Raffle Product in WooCommerce:

Our plugin is integrated with woocommerce. Once the category is setup and you have the settings configured, you need to create a product for the raffle ticket in woocommerce.

Configure the product as normal woocommerce product with title, description and price. Then you need to configure the options to make it a Raffle Product.

In the Product Data section – Number of Raffle Tickets: You must put a whole number in that box. That is the number of raffle tickets to be generated for EACH product that is sold in woo. It is NOT THE TOTAL NUMBER OF TICKETS FOR A RAFFLE! One of the great benefits of the Raffle Ticket Generator is the ability to promote Ticket Packages. We have an article here {https://wpraffle.com/price-tickets-virtual-online-raffle-fundraiser/} that has a few suggestions for how to price your tickets for maximum fundraising results.

For example:

Single Ticket Entry – the qty for Number of Raffle Tickets will be: 1 (when someone buys this product, they will get 1 ticket number)
5 Ticket Entry – the qty for Number of Raffle Tickets will be: 5 (when someone buys this product, they will get 5 ticket numbers)
10Ticket Entry – the qty for Number of Raffle Tickets will be: 10 (when someone buys this product, they will get 10 ticket numbers)

In order to connect the raffle ticket product to the proper raffle configuration – you MUST SELECT the proper raffle category on the right hand side. If you want the product to be in multiple categories for your online shop, the raffle category must be assigned as the primary category. It is ok to nest categories, but our plugin will look for the settings in the primary category and if the primary category is not a raffle category or there is no category assigned, our plugin does not know what to generate and will not assign tickets to the order.

Also in the Product Data section is a checkbox: Display Number of Tickets. IF you want to display the number of tickets for this product on the product detail page, this needs to be checked. It will appear like this:

Once you have these settings you can test your raffle with a few test orders.

How Online Raffle Tickets are generated:
The Raffle Ticket Generator will add raffle tickets to an order when the order is moved from pending or on-hold to a paid status. A full description of the woocommerce order status options are here: { https://docs.woocommerce.com/document/managing-orders/}

Different payment gateways function differently. And the Paypal Simple plugin does not accurately report back to woocommerce that the order has been paid – it returns a pending status. The Raffle Ticket Generator plugin in this instance will not create a ticket on that order because the order has not been paid for. There are many auto complete plugins available for woocommerce and many of the ones we have seen simply change the order in the db to completed, but they do not use the proper woocommerce hooks to set the order from pending to processing to completed. In this circumstance, the Raffle Ticket Generator plugin does not get any notification that the order has been paid for and thus tickets are not generated.
To check for functionality of the Raffle Ticket Generator not generating tickets, you need to manually set the order status.

Within woocommerce “Edit Order” manually set the status to on-hold and click update to set the order state.
Then – with the order in the on-hold state, Change the Order Statue to Processing and click update on the right side. You should then see the Ticket Numbers on the order.

Tickets with images are not displaying:
One of the most common support issues is that designers are on shared hosting or an unmanaged vps and the ticket images are not getting generated. We rely on the gdimage library functions. There are various versions and while I wish we knew every shared hosting that works and those that don’t we simply are not that good.
Before you open a support ticket – please review the troubleshooting suggestions { https://wpraffle.com/troubleshooting-steps-raffle-plugin/}

If your orders look like above – the issue is 99.9% the gdlibrary function on your hosting server. The easy way to test if the plugin is working is to uncheck the option in the Raffle Ticket Generator settings for that category for using ticket images. Check “No, just display the ticket numbers in order confirmation email”
Then place a new test order and you should see the tickets displaying properly.