arlo-training-and-event-management-system

Too many hidden costs and barriers to use.Seems like it might be helpful if it was more honest and accessible.

Having this plugin on our website, and being SO functional and so seamlessly integrated was a huge part in our successful pivot to online webinars and managing registrations of our „new normal“ limited capacity in-person classes during the COVID-19 pandemic. Being fairly tech-savvy and with moderate web-developer talents, I was able to completely customize the WordPress plugin to match our brand. I’ve received so many complements from people about our registration system and how easy it was to use. Thank you to Arlo for making such a wonderful plugin. We are VERY happy Arlo customers.

Edit: Improving my rating due to recently improved support and not wanting to hurt a company’s work due to the one bad egg I appear to have dealt with. Technical feature requests remain. Initially, Arlo seemed promising, however mid-way through development issues with syncing of events started. The Arlo support team took up to 48 hours to return support tickets and essentially blamed me for the issue. The workaround was to launch the site to a staging server, sync Arlo and then copy the database back to local (a solution that I had to formulate). Development of a custom theme was not as „clean“ as described as even the „Custom“ Arlo theme (which is aimed at developers who want to write their own CSS) injects javascript for popups and stylesheets which complicates development isn’t mobile-friendly and results in more server calls than necessary. The controls for displaying events are also in need of improvement, as depending on where you require them to be placed on the template the hard-coded heading structures will result in the incorrect page heading structure. The integration is also not as seamless as described, the checkout page will redirect the user to Arlo’s own checkout site which could be improved in terms of design. All you can do is change the logo. The choice to use Arlo was a decision made by my client prior to my development. Regardless my intention and efforts centred around integrating Arlo to the best of my ability.

Using Arlo’s full capabilities as an admin system for a training company made life a lot easier and took a lot of manual admin out of the business. Connecting it to the website was a godsend, now customers are able to book courses without any help, with a payment going straight into our bank account via Stripe and Xero. The plugin fits into the theme customisations we’ve made quite easily. Implementation was really straightforward and I’ve yet to encounter a synchronisation error. There are several things that could be improved – I’ve found that the company’s support is ridiculously good and they’re very open to ideas.

As a part-time admin, with limited tech knowledge in a small organisation offering nearly 80 free courses in our funding year, I have been waiting eagerly for something like Arlo. Whilst we have only gone properly „live“ with the web integration recently, after a long gestation (delays our end due to limited finance and resources) we are excited to see the time-saving for admin that the plugin is already providing. It is fantastic how quickly you can update course content and dates on the website via the Arlo plugin, and how our end users can easily see up-to-date info – what courses are full, have wait lists etc… All the way through Arlo staff have been patient and helpful. They also seem responsive and are welcome to new suggestions too 🙂

The plugin works well for us. We use it for live events and also to send elearning registrations to Moodle, so people can sign up online and begin studying straight away. The Arlo team has been helpful with CSS, figuring out the Moodle connection and more.