The Events Calendar 3.0 Preview: Other Settings Tabs

It’s a new week, and I’m keeping the preview posts for The Events Calendar / Events Calendar PRO 3.0 coming full force. If you watched my last round you’ll know we ended last week focusing on a marathon 2-part video detailing the “General” settings tab in all its glory.

Today, we’re continuing down that path and reviewing the remaining settings tabs: specifically, “Display,” “Default Content” and “Additional Fields”. I’d aimed to make this into one, 5 minute video…but no matter how fast I spoke that didn’t work. So this preview — available after the jump — is actually a two-parter.

Part 1

Part 2

So, what’d we learn? To recap…

“Display” impacts all-things related to the frontend template you’ve selected. This is where you’ll decide the stylesheet settings you want to use — anywhere from a basic skeleton stylesheet (which would require you to add your own styles for it to look good) to our Tribe Events styles, which are designed and styled enough that they could probably work for most sites directly out-of-the box. You can also select your page template here, using either of the options pre-bundled with the plugin or those associated with your theme, and can enable/disable frontend views available to your users. Lastly, you can set a default events view here (what your users see when they visit /events on the frontend) and can add HTML before/after the calendar itself.

“Default Content” is a site administrator’s way of pre-populating the venue and organizer fields for anyone who creates a new event. The options you select here will appear already selected in the dropdown for anyone who goes to create an event; they can change it to another existing venue/organizer or add their own, if they want to. You can also set content here that will automatically populate any new Venue created under Events –> Venues on the backend. If you use the same venue/organizer/location a lot, this could save you or the people entering your events a lot of time.

“Additional Fields” are custom event attributes that appear alongside the rest of your prominent event metadata — date, time, venue, organizer — above the description on the frontend. Got a weekly event that uses a different DJ each week? Add a “DJ” field and write the fellow’s name so your users can decide if this is the show for them. Whatever attributes you make available will be accessible by anyone creating an event; if you don’t want them used, you’ll need to Remove them entirely. It’s worth noting these additional fields existed in 2.x and are being carried over to 3.0 with one major change: we’ve added a URL field as well, so you don’t have to add HTML to include links now.

“Licenses” and “Help” are more administrative than anything. Enter your license keys on the “Licenses” tab (remember the plugin works 100% without a license, you just don’t get support or updates); and come to “Help” when you’re struggling or need a buddy.

That’s it for the settings tabs! We’ll be back to reviewing the frontend in the next session. If you haven’t checked out our main 3.0 preview page…well, what better time than now?