Schedule Day View

Activating this extension will replace The Events Calendar‘s Day View with a Schedule Day View (affectionately sometimes also called Conference Day View).

Schedule Day View is a minimalistic view with a focus on answering the question “Which events are happening right now?” Answering this question quickly is very useful for those attending a conference, convention, or other function with events happening simultaneously or back-to-back (“What’s next?”).

To accomplish this, we added the context of All Day, Morning, Afternoon, and Evening time slots to Day View. We also added some logic to the view to highlight events happening right now (FYI: a day’s “All Day” events are always happening right now.)

From a technical perspective, it creates a template override through a plugin (leveraging the various tribe_get_template_part_path_… filters) instead of needing to be in your active theme. This also means that any template overrides you might do for the following files will not take effect while this extension is active:

day/single.php
day/single-event.php
day/single-featured.php
day/loop.php

However, this snippet will make it so Schedule Day View only loads when viewing today’s Day View:

add_filter( 'tribe_ext_sch_day_view_only_if_today', '__return_true' );

Additionally, Schedule Day View works with the additional functionality added by Filter Bar, Events Calendar PRO, and the popular third-party Category Colors plugin:

With Filter Bar installed and activated, site visitors will be able to filter Schedule Day View’s events by Venue and/or Event Category. For example, “What events are happening right now… in Ballroom A?”
With Events Calendar PRO installed and activated, each event’s venue will be linked to its Single Venue page.
With The Events Calendar Category Colors installed and activated, each event title will have the event category’s colored background:

Features

Minimalistic design:
- Groups events by time of day and displays a count of the events within each
- Displays date, title, venue name (linked to the Single Venue page if PRO is active), and cost
- Featured Events stand out with an eye-catching blue background and white text. Events that are not featured have a white background with black text.
- Does not display featured image, venue address, excerpt, “Continue reading” link, or “Find out more” link; the event title links to the Single Event page.
Static time slots matching Filter Bar’s: All Day, Morning, Afternoon, Evening, and Night.
- Conversely, the default Day View creates time slots dynamically, grouping two events starting at 5:30 PM into a “5:30 PM” time slot.
- If an event started a previous day (e.g. 11 PM – 2 AM), the event will appear in the All Day or Morning time slot, as appropriate.
- The “Morning” time slot includes events that started a prior day (e.g. yesterday at 10 PM) through today prior to noon.
- The “Afternoon” time slot includes events starting at noon and before 5 PM.
- The “Evening” time slot includes events starting at 5 PM and before 10 PM.
- The “Night” time slot includes events starting at 10 PM or later.
When displaying Schedule Day View for Today:
- All inactive time slots are collapsed and right now’s time slot is expanded.
- Day View’s title changes from “Events for March 17, 2018” to “Today’s Events”.
When displaying Day View for a day that is not today, all time slots having events are expanded by default, but the site visitor can collapse any of the time slots.
Loads its assets (CSS and JS) only when needed:
- Always loads the assets if Events Calendar PRO is active because its [tribe_events view=”day”] shortcode could be anywhere on any page.
- Only load assets on an event archive view if rendering the Day View archive.

Notes

Events will appear in the time slot in which they begin. Therefore, if an event is from 8 AM – 7 PM, it will only appear in the Morning time slot, not also the Afternoon or Evening time slots.
The time slot times come from your WordPress General Settings timezone option. Be aware that some events may be in a different timezone and therefore appear in an unexpected time slot.
See Best Practices for Implementing Custom Code Snippets for more help.
This extension was created during our 2018 Team Trip’s Heart & Craft Day. Several people from multiple departments across the company (Agency, Front End, Back End, QA, and Support) worked to form this idea and deliver it to you.