The SeatLayer Hosted Ticketing plugin puts a real seating chart on a page or post. Visitors see live availability, pick the seats they want, and pay through SeatLayer’s managed checkout, with the money going straight into your own payment gateway. The block renders the same interactive seat map as the SDK.
Friday · 7:30 PM · The Lantern Theatre
You can paste the embed into a Custom HTML block, but the plugin keeps your key safe, lets editors pick the event from a list, and brings buyers back to the right page after paying.
Listing your events needs a key that can also create and modify them. The plugin makes that call from WordPress itself, through an admin-only route, so the key is never written into a page a visitor can read.
server-side · never in the browser
Whoever writes the page chooses the event by name in the block sidebar. No copying identifiers between two browser tabs, and no silently-wrong chart because a character was dropped.
[seatlayer_chart event="…"]
With in-page checkout on, a card payment that leaves for the gateway returns to the exact page holding the chart, read in the browser at load so a cached page cannot send a buyer to the wrong address.
works with cached pages
Good to know: the plugin shows your SeatLayer event, and SeatLayer runs the checkout and tickets. You design venues, create events, connect your gateway, and handle refunds and check-in in your SeatLayer dashboard.
Drop the block or shortcode on any page or post. Buyers pick their exact seats and pay through your own payment gateway. All the plugin needs is the event key; a secret key is optional and only fills the event list in the editor. Install it from wp-admin > Plugins > Add New, searching for SeatLayer, or straight from the WordPress plugin directory.
Design the chart in your SeatLayer dashboard: rows, tables, booths, general-admission areas, multiple floors. Then create the event that sells against it. One chart can carry every later performance.
Connect your own payment gateway under Payments and assign it to the event. Buyers pay you; SeatLayer never sits in the middle of the money.
Activate it, then optionally paste a secret key under Settings → SeatLayer. Leave it blank and everything still works; you type event keys by hand instead of choosing them from a list.
Search for SeatLayer seating chart in the block inserter and pick your Hosted Ticketing event. On a classic-editor site, the event-only shortcode does the same managed job and renders through exactly the same code.
[seatlayer_chart event="your-event" height="640"]By default the buyer is handed to SeatLayer's page to pay. Switch Checkout to keep them on your site, and add your site's address in SeatLayer once, so a buyer paying by card returns to your page. Preview it, buy a test seat, then go on sale.
SeatLayer never holds your money: buyers pay into your own payment account. The same seat map is benchmarked at 200,000 seats, so it handles a 300-seat room and a stadium alike.
The plugin is free. No subscription and no percentage; your payment gateway charges its own processing fee.
It does not work standalone, so installing it means your pages and your visitors talk to SeatLayer. The same disclosure ships inside the plugin's own readme, and it is the whole list.
On a page that contains a Hosted Ticketing chart, and only on such a page, the browser loads the managed renderer and asks SeatLayer for the seating layout and live availability. Selecting seats places a hold; buying starts SeatLayer’s managed payment journey through your connected gateway.
Only if you saved a secret key, and only inside the block editor: your server asks SeatLayer for your event list to fill the dropdown. That request carries the key and no visitor data, and the response is projected down to the four fields the dropdown shows.
Deleting the plugin removes its settings, including any saved key. Deactivating deliberately leaves everything alone.
Still have a question? or email hello@seatlayer.io. Own checkout? Use the SDK instead.
Design the venue, create an event, connect your gateway, and drop the block on the page you already send people to.