Event calendars are pretty complex and difficult systems to build. There are lots of plugins that provide a range of functionality, everything from really, really simple events management, to full blow event calendar layouts, ticket purchased and more. A lot of people, however, are very unsatisfied with the available options, either because they are too complex or don't fit in with the site's design. So I'm going to show you how to create a simple events system that can fit in perfectly with your site, no matter what theme you use.
You must be logged in and have an active premium membership to view the rest of this content. Register or login from the sidebar.
Related Items
Thanks for the tutorial, very timely for a project I’m working on.
Would it be possible to show the excerpt and a thumbnail with the event name and time?
If so could you demonstrate that?
Thanks
You can absolutely show the excerpt and thumbnail for the events.
For the thumbnail, you would use something like this:
echo get_the_post_thumbnail($event->ID, 'thumbnail-size');
For the excerpt you can use:
echo wpautop($event->post_excerpt);
how do you decide when to use get_posts vs WP_Query?
why do you use a page template vs a custom post type archive?
For situations like this I prefer to use get_posts() because I find it simpler, but either will work fine. There’s a great article on choosing the loop method on Dig WP: http://digwp.com/2011/05/loops/
You could use the post type archive here as well, and perhaps that would be better. For a full-blown events system, the archive would definitely be better, but for something simple like this, it doesn’t make a lot of difference.
Thanks for the tutorial… Can you tell how can we add the events in a calendar on a calendar.
I mean calender on frontend showing events according to date.
Sorry but that is far beyond the scope of this tutorial.
Thanks for the tutorial, it’s very nice!
i was about to ask the same question as Paul!
See my response to Paul.
To be honest that is more of css and layout question than a php /wordpress question. There are loads of tutorials about layout in calendar form using css and js. Then all you would need to do is figure out your repeating floats and work on your event styles.
That is more or less true. There would still be quite a bit of PHP involved to actually generate the calendar days / weeks / months correctly.
Hey Pippin ! I’m so stoked that you put this tutorial together, thank you! It’s allowed me to create the events system that I was after.
If you have the time, it would be great to learn how to separate events into categories (IE – live & webinars, etc.) Maybe a second tutorial ?
Cheers man!
Loren – http://NewDirectionIRA.com
I’ll plan to do another tutorial that will include category support
Do you have another tutorial that shows how to add sort and filter elements? For example, filter events based on location or only in January or change from ASC to DESC date.
I don’t, not at this time. I am planning on doing a tutorial some time this next week about filtering by meta data, so that should help you out.