Adding calendar to specific pages

[Morena]

Hi,
I purchased the plugin today and I am looking to add a smaller version of the calendar to a couple of my pages. Searching the forums I understand the plugin does not support short codes… I also found various references to template tags. Unfortunately I do not have php skills to create my own template or edit the php code.

Is there an “easy” way to accomplish that?

Thanks much,
Moca

[Jonah]

Hi Moca,

Thanks for your purchase! Have you seen or tried the Calendar widget? Maybe this would work for you?

Aside from that, there is unfortunately no easy way to accomplish this. You’re going to need to dig into the code a bit and it’s more than I can take time to explain in the forums here. I would suggest hiring a developer to help you out with this. Sorry I can’t offer up more here.

Good luck,
Jonah

[Morena]

Hi Jonah, I was afraid you’d say that. I’ll try to see if there is another plugin to allow me to include this plugin on specific pages.

Do you of a developer or a post that list developers?

Cheers,
Moca

[Rob]

Hi Morena. While we don’t have a post that lists off developers, we do have a few freelance developers whose names we refer out to users who are interested. If you wanted to shoot us an email to pro /a/ tri.be we can get that out to you.

[Henry]

Perhaps you could use an iframe to load the grid view (the full calendar) on a standard wordPress page.

iframes are good and bad depending on what you use them for. The good points include being able to load a page within a page quite easily.

A bad point is the content within the iframe doesn’t get treated as page content by Google so you won’t get valuable SEO points for anything inside the iframe. In general, keep your valuable content outside of an iframe and stuff that you’re not bothered about scoring SEO points for can go inside. An example of something else you could have in an iframe is a Google map.

[Rob]

Awesome suggestion, Henry…as always. Thanks for sharing.

Morena: let us know if you’re still having any issues or questions after digesting the information Henry has presented above.

[Jim McClain]

Is there any documentation for using an iframe to show the calendar grid on a WP page? I am using Weaver II Pro theme and I have the ability to change the sidebars for individual pages. I can’t seem to find a way to do that with The Events Calendar Pro in a default page template or any other page type template (the sidebar options aren’t available on posts, only pages).

If I could load the iframe on an actual WP page, it would solve my problem – I want a 3-column design, but NOT on the calendar grid page, where I want only a 2 column design (the right column is only for upcoming events, which don’t need to appear on the calendar grid page).

Thanks for any guidance on this.

Jim

[Jonah]

Hi Jim,

To load the calendar in an iframe you would just do something like this: https://gist.github.com/2763101

Then you would need to style the iframe accordingly to get it to be the right size and have any other specific styling you need.

It should work but I cannot guarantee there won’t be problems but at first glance it seems to work ok. I wouldn’t really recommend this approach though because everything in the iframe is not viewable by search engines.

Have you tried manually setting the page layout for the calendar grid page in Weaver Pro II? I’m not sure if this is an option but some themes will allow you to filter or manually set page layouts through a built in function.

I’ve got some basic conditional wrappers to test for the various event related pages that could help you with this. https://gist.github.com/2415009

I hope that helps but let me know if you have any other questions.

Cheers,
Jonah

[Jim McClain]

Hi Jonah, thanks for the reply. I agree that an iframe page has issues that make this an unacceptable solution. There are sidebar options for pages using the Weaver II theme, but The Events Calendar grid/list page is not a real page, so no options can be selected for it.

I think the best solution might be to create a new page template, with the left sidebar hard coded to appear. I have no idea how to create that page though. I tried it, but failed miserably.

Jim

[Jim McClain]

PS: I hope the shortcode will see a return as a viable option. It would make this so much easier. Most plugins similar to this use shortcode as do many other plugins, so people are comfortable with its use. I’m stuck with yours because, unfortunately, no other calendar/events plugin comes close to the quality otherwise. How’s that for an off-hand compliment. 😉

[Jonah]

The shortcode is a somewhat complicated solution mainly because of the rewriting that needs to be done for the calendar, list, single events, etc. If we were to make a shortcode we would need to change how the whole rewrite system currently bases off of the Events URL slug (/events or whatever you have set) to base it instead off of whatever page you’ve inserted the calendar into so the URL looks good wherever you are in the hierarchy.

You can for example include the gridview.php file into anywhere on your site like so:

include('wp-content/plugins/the-events-calendar/views/gridview.php');


But the downside to this is that going forward or backward in the calendar will take you back to the main /events page (or whatever you have set as the base URL slug) because of the whole rewrite system that needs to go off of that base.

So, that’s basically where we are at with that. We do have some discussion going on about this because I agree it’s not the most ideal situation right now and it can be difficult for more custom setups to get exactly what you want with the plugin. That being said, we went in this direction to make it easier for beginner users to activate the plugin and have a calendar right away without the need to use a shortcode.

There are of course ways if you do need to more fully customize your setup to use different sidebars or what not on events pages. You just need to know how to modify your theme from more of a core level. If you haven’t seen the tutorial we put together on implementing the plugin with the Genesis framework, check it out. It’s got some gems in it that will help along these lines of customizing the plugin within your theme. https://theeventscalendar.com/tutorial-integrating-the-events-calendar-w-genesis/

Sorry I can’t offer up more here but hopefully this gives you something more to work on and thanks for the compliment!

Cheers,
Jonah

[Jim McClain]

Yes, the more I use and work with The Events Calendar, the more I see how shortcodes would actually be a step backward.

I watched the video in reference to the sidebars and it was a very short clip on it. It could be a great benefit to have a short video or text tutorial on using the conditionals. I asked about this in another topic, so I won’t get into it here. This topic has been very informative. Thanks.

Jim

[Rob]

Thanks for the follow-up, Jim, and for your participation on this thread. I’ll watch for the other one where you mention getting into the broader conditionals aspect in another thread here on the forums…and please let us know if we can do anything else.

[Author]

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