4 questions on sidebars, map page, meta and excerpt.

Hi Alex,

That’s a lot of questions!

I’ll try to answer each in turn but if you need to go into further detail on more than one point please start posting fresh threads as, generally speaking, we try hard to stick to one issue or question per support thread 🙂

I would like set the default view as the photo grid-view on full width (so no sidebar). This is how my events list is displayed now now and that’s OK.
However I would like the single event to show a sidebar.

OK. So there are a couple of ways you can approach this. The first thing to do here is familiarize yourself with the Themer’s Guide which covers the basics for setting up template overrides. From there, you could override default-template.php (if you are using the Default Events Template) and add some code to check if the current request is for a single event – then flip to an alternative template from there using some logic like:

if ( tribe_is_event() && tribe_is_singular() ) {
    locate_template( 'page-with-sidebar', true );
    return;
}

Of course the exact solution will vary according to the templates that ship with your theme.

I would also like to build a page which is showing the MAP view. However since you do not have shortcodes how do I achieve that?

Is there a reason you can’t simply link to the existing map view generated by our plugin?

I also want to make shorter (like 15/20 words) the default text (excerpt) under every event photo view. Now the text is too long, resulting in longer scrolling pages. Where can I change this parameter (apparently it does not take my BLOG excerpt settings).

The excerpt is ultimately pulled in via WordPress’s own get_the_excerpt() function – so this is in some ways a more general WordPress question. Luckily, WordPress does supply a filter hook called get_the_excerpt though that you might use to change the excerpt to whatever you like and there is an even more specific filter called excerpt_length that lets you specify the desired length in terms of how many words it should contain.

How do I show the POST META on the photo view and where can I configure that?

Do you mean the same event meta that shows in single event view? You don’t need to answer that here necessarily – you could create a new thread for this – but it would be great if you could provide some additional detail on what you are trying to achieve.

Thanks!