raccroc

Appreciate the reply. That was my fear, and not at all surprising. It seems like I keep hitting my head against the wall trying to do something which just doesn’t seem like it should be all that difficult.

Here is a better explanation…

Background: I am the president of a small non-profit, all volunteer dog rescue. I have a background in Networking and Sys Admin, which makes me the “tech guy” even though I don’t have a web-dev background at all. I built us a web page using WordPress and added on WooCommerce so we could sell shirts and other types of logo-wear on the site.

Recently, the ladies of the rescue decided they want to sell tickets for a raffle drawing of donated goods as a fundraiser.

Our Plan:
Sell raffle tickets at our booths during a couple of festival events in December.
Sell raffle tickets online and promote them on our social networks.
Have a live “put-your-hand-in-a-bag” drawing at the end of the second festival event.

I looked at raffle web sites and WordPress plugins; however, most of what I found really doesn’t work for what we want. They tend to focus mostly on things like generating winners, prize distribution, and pretty front ends. I have no issues building the front end and don’t really need most of the other features. Similar type of experience with various events/tickets type of plugins, which were largely full of needless (to us) features, such as reservations.

My Plan:
Buy two rolls of Raffle Tickets.
Roll 1 – Ticket Numbers 657001-657999
Roll 2 – Ticket Numbers 658001-658999
Offline: Sell Roll 1 tickets for Cash Only. Whenever someone buys in cash, capture their Name, Phone #, Email, and 657XXX number(s) on a simple sales sheet, tear off the corresponding ticket, and put it in a bag.
Online: For online and in-person Credit Card transactions, process via Woocommerce and capture their Name, Phone #, Email, and a sequential number for each purchased ticket starting at 658XXX.
At the end of the Raffle Tickets Sales Deadline, we look up the number of online tickets sold, tear off that many tickets, and add them to the same bag as the offline/cash tickets.
Draw a ticket…
If it starts with 657, look at the sign-up sales sheet for the contact info of the winner.
If is starts with 687, look up in Woocommerce to find that Order Number for the contact info for the winner.

It looks like WooCommerce Sequential Order Numbers Pro would allow us to sync up the online Order Number with the physical roll of ticket number. Problem we would have is if the sequential numbers were not filtered/locked to a specific category or tag (such as raffle) would be that the numbers would no longer correspond to a specific ticket any longer if anyone buys anything else off our website at any point during the raffle period. My hope was that we could assign different starting numbers for each product category, each which it’s own custom order numbering scheme. It seems to be clashes with random numbers could easily be avoided by enforcing that when using “mixed mode” all product categories using sequential numbers would be forced to have a prefix set, such as raff-, whereas anything using random order numbers would not. Not allowing the same number of digits for both random and fixed would also avoid clashes.

Sounded very simple in my head. Apparently I was wrong.

I guess one possible solution would be to create and fully separate sand-boxed WordPress/WooCommerce and then frame it in to our main site, but that seems like a lot of work for something so silly.

With appreciation -john

Perfect, thanks!
(also…really appreciate the quick response)