Getting Started with The Events Calendar’s New Views

You’ve read about. We’ve been talking about it. We’re elated to announce the newly redesign calendar views for The Events Calendar are here!

For years we’ve been proud to be the go-to calendar solution for WordPress users. But we don’t just want to rest on our laurels—we’re always striving to improve and to meet our users’ evolving needs. That’s exactly why we decided to embark on a major design overhaul of The Events Calendar.

The Events Calendar 5.0 introduces a significant redesign of every calendar view. If you haven’t seen the changes, it’s worth checking out the release notes and this knowledgebase article before updating.

How to enable the new designs

To make the transition to 5.0 easier, we added an option to the plugin settings that allows you to enable the new designs. That way, your calendar only updates to the new version if you decide to use them. Otherwise, your calendar (and any customizations you made to it) will remain safely in place.

Screenshot of the "User updated calendar designs" setting in The Events Calendar plugin settings with the checkbox checked, which enables the new designs.

The plugin will ask whether you want to update to the new designs the first time you log into WordPress after updating to 5.0. You can either enable them right there or skip and upgrade your styles later.

To activate the updated calendar views later, log into WordPress and head over to the plugin settings, which are under Events → Settings in the WordPress admin. Click on the “Display” tab at the top of the screen to open up the calendar’s display settings.

This is the specific setting you’re looking for. It is located about halfway down the page.

Check that box and make sure to hit the Save Changes button at the bottom of the screen. This will activate the new view styles.

What happens after updating

First things first: your events are completely untouched. Those are safe and managed the same way they’ve always been. And aside from the new option to enable the new designs, no other changes have been made to the plugin in the WordPress admin.

What you will notice is that the front end style of your calendar will look different — in a very good way. 😎

These updates needed to address a few common pain points for our users. One of those issues was multi-day events in monthly calendar view. In the new-and-improved view, these events show as a single event spanning multiple days, rather than a recurring event that repeats each day.

We also spruced up photo view so that each event card has a consistent fixed height. Another big update: We reworked map view so that every Events Calendar Pro user can have a beautiful, functional map, whether or not they have access to a premium Google Maps API Key. We took care to apply the new design across every piece of The Events Calendar. No matter which view you use, everything looks clean, cohesive, and polished.