The hall plan is an SVG drawing of your hall in which every booth area carries the booth number as its name. Any drawing program that saves SVG will do – Inkscape, Adobe Illustrator, Affinity Designer or Figma. Without a drawing program, draw the plan directly in WordPress with the Hall Plan Designer add-on.
Preparing the SVG file
- 1Draw the floor plan
Walls, aisles, labels – everything guests need for orientation.
- 2Each booth area as its own shape
A rectangle, a polygon or a path – a single object, not part of one large combined shape.
- 3Name the booth area after the booth number
Give the object the name “A12” in the layers or object panel. That’s all: on upload the plugin reads the name wherever your program stores it and writes it into the ID (
id). - 4Name floors and rooms (optional)
A layer “Floor: Ground floor” becomes a tab of its own, an area “Room: Trade hall” a room of that tab – see below.
- 5Leave the rest unnamed
Aisles, walls and labels need no name. Everything without a matching name stays static background.
- 6Save as SVG and upload
Then add it to the event via “Add SVG map” – see Adding the hall plan.
The plugin doesn’t change that. Have your administrator enable the SVG format – e.g. with a plugin such as “Safe SVG” – before you try. Allow SVG uploads only for trusted roles.
Floors and rooms in one file
| What | Name in the drawing program | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Floor | a layer or group “Floor: Ground floor” (or “Etage: Erdgeschoss”) | a tab of its own with its own file |
| Room | an area “Room: Hall A” (or “Raum: Händlersaal”) | a room (sub-location) of that tab |
| Booth | an object “A12” | clickable booth area |
Case doesn’t matter; instead of the colon a hyphen, underscore or space works too. So one file with three floors becomes a plan with three tabs, with the rooms already in place. A file without floor names becomes a single tab as before.
Illustrator in id and data-name (special characters encoded, e.g. _x3A_ for the colon), Inkscape in inkscape:label, Affinity in serif:id, Figma in id. The plugin reads all of these and decodes the encodings. It reports duplicate names on upload – Affinity, for instance, silently turns a second “K-04” into “K-041”.
What must be right in the file
| Right | Wrong |
|---|---|
A12 | A 12 with a space or A-12 when the exhibitor has A12. |
| Each booth number exactly once | The same number on two areas – the plugin reports it on upload. |
Two areas, two names; A12, A13 at the exhibitor | Both numbers in a single name. |
| Draw the booth number as text as well | Only the name set – then nothing is readable on the plan. |
A viewBox in the SVG so the plan scales | Fixed width and height without viewBox. |
| Take the file over via “Import” | “Use file unchanged” although the numbers are only in the object names or Illustrator encoded them (e.g. _x31_2 for “12”) – then nothing is translated and the booth isn’t found. |
Case may differ: a12 in the file matches A12 at the exhibitor.
You may also put the name on a group that combines area and label. Then the whole group becomes clickable and highlighted – the label stays readable. It is only wrong if the name sits on a group spanning several booths.
Guide lines, notes or forgotten drafts appear on the plan. Clean up the file before uploading.
Quick check
Attach the plan to the event, open the page and click a booth area. If the info sheet opens, the name is right. Already on upload the plugin shows how many named objects it found and how many of them belong to an exhibitor.