We’re going to take a look at the Events Calendar widget, also known as the Mini Calendar. We’ll cover the basics of adding this Pro-specific widget to a sidebar, how to configure it, and some tips and tricks on how to customize the widget further.

So, let’s get started.

Adding the Events Calendar Widget to a Sidebar

The Events Calendar widget is a feature that comes bundled with The Events Calendar PRO. To activate it, you’ll need to make sure that The Events Calendar PRO is first installed and active on your site.

From there, head over to Appearance → Widgets from the WordPress dashboard. You’re looking for a widget called Events Calendar. Careful, because this could be easily confused with the Calendar widget, which is packaged with WordPress and not related to The Events Calendar at all.

See the Events Calendar widget? Drag it over to the sidebar widget area of your choice, then save your settings.

There we have it. Now we can go to the front end of our website and see the Mini Calendar in all its mini and mighty glory.

Events Calendar Widget Settings

First thing you might notice when adding the widget to the sidebar is that there are a few options that allow us to customize things a bit. These are the available options:

  • Title: This is the heading that sits above the widget on the front end of the site. By default, it is “Events Calendar,” but can be changed to anything we’d like.
  • Number of Events to Show: This allows you to set the maximum number of events that display in the list below the calendar at any given time. By default, this is set to five, but can be any number between one and ten.
  • Add a filter: This option allows you to limit the events that display in the widget to certain categories and tags. Let’s say we only want events categorized as Conference to display in the widget. Perfect, add a filter! How about Conferences and Workshops? Add two filters!

Block Option

Mini calendar block

When using the Block Editor, you can add the Mini Calendar as a block instead. Simply search for Mini Calendar under blocks and you’ll find all of the same available options.

Customizing the Events Calendar Widget

The Events Calendar Widget will take styles from the main calendar Month View, so any template changes that you make to the Month View will impact the widget as well.

If you’d like to make changes, you can create a template override of the corresponding Month View template.

Embedding the Widget

Another awesome thing about the Events Calendar widget is that it can be embedded on any page or post outside of the sidebar. In other words, we can place it anywhere we want!

Embedding the widget can be as easy as pasting this shortcode into any page or post:

[tribe_mini_calendar]

There are a slew of other options available for this shortcode which you can read about more fully in this tutorial on the subject.

Wrapping Up

We hope this provides a thorough overview of the Events Calendar widget including how to add it to a sidebar, configure the settings, and even make some advanced customizations to it.