Advice on integrating Events Calendar Pro/Community Events into wider project

[Marcus J Wilson]

We’ve used Events Calendar Pro in a number of projects already, and we’re currently integrating the plugin into a more complex project build for a community Film Festival web project.

The project will involve integrating the Events Calendar into a wider social network on the website for film makers, using BuddyPress. Given the complexity of the project, I was wondering if you can advise us on the best approach to some of the challenges in the project…

In particular, we will need to:

(1) Extend the standard fields Events to include additional information, and add these fields to our front end registration form. We have a license for Community Events, but are using Gravity Forms elsewhere on the site for front end submission. In particular, we would need to allow users who submit a “screening” event to choose one film from a Film custom post type that we have set up in WordPress as part of the submission process, linking the event to the film. It would be good to know if it is best to accomplish this by hacking/hooking into the Community Events front end form, or whether we should build out a Gravity Form to submit to the events database.

(2) We will need to developer an Organisations directory, with front end submission for Organisations. We’re wondering whether to extend the Events Calendar Pro Organizers Custom Post Type with our own additional fields, or whether to build a new WordPress Organisations custom post type for this.

(3) Following on from the Organisations custom post type, we would need users who are submitting events from the front end to be able to choose an Organisation from a drop down list to associate an event with. However, this Organisation list will need to be filtered to show just Organisations that the user is an author of in WordPress (i.e. those Organisations they have submitted). So, it would be good to explore again if the Community Events form can be hacked/hooked to just show Organizers that the current user is associated with.

(4) Finally, we’d need to display any Events linked to a particular Organisation or User alongside that Organisation in the front end (“This Organisation’s events…”), and alongside the user in BuddyPress (“This User’s Events”). I think this will be relatively straightforward if we can accomplish (1)-(3) above.

So, we’d be grateful for your advice on the best approach – whether it’s best to try and accomplish the above functionality within Events Calendar Pro/Community Events, or whether we’re better building most of the Organisations/user submission functionality ourselves, and then having light touch integration with Event Calendar Pro for events/venues.

Best wishes and thanks. Happy New Year to you!

Marcus

[Casey]

Pookapro,
Thanks for reaching out! Hopefully I can answer some of your questions and at least get you started in the right direction.

1) You can customize the Community Event Submission form by performing a template override (Instructions) Then you’d want to hook into the ‘wp_insert_post’ action and save all of your new custom form values when the Form is submitted.

2) It depends. 🙂 If you don’t need the ‘Organizer’ functionality, then that’s fine. Otherwise I would suggest creating a new Custom Post Type for this, so that the Organizer functionality will remain.

3) You’ll want to look at customizing/rewriting the ‘tribe_community_events_organizer_select_menu‘ method to do something like this.

4) Again, you should be able to do this by performing a Template Override for the EC Pro template files.

Hopefully that helps you make a decision, but I would encourage you to look at our documentation further to make the best decision for yourself on the correct course of action.

Thanks and let me know if you have further questions!

Cheers,
Casey

[Marcus J Wilson]

Many thanks, Casey –

In terms of Events and links into WooCommerce, ECP does about 90% of what we need it to, so I’d be keen to avoid rebuilding a lot of functionality from scratch. We will probably try to extend the ECP Organizers custom post type to handle the additional Organisations functionality we’ll need.

However, from quickly checking the Organizer post type in ECP, it looks like the tribe_organizer post type doesn’t support Authors just now, so we would need to add that to the plugin, I guess.

Also, we’ve noticed that the name of the Organizer seems to be duplicated in ECP in the post Title and within the custom field _OrganizerOrganizer. Can you explain the logic behind when the post Title is used, and when this custom field is used?

Let me get back to you if we run into any specific questions as we make these additions.

Best wishes and thanks
Marcus

[Tony]

Hello Marcus
Please let us know how you get on with integrating Gravity Forms. I have tried and failed to get the ECP and Gravity to speak.

[Marcus J Wilson]

We’ve got Gravity forms working in part to submit an Organizer to ECP. All fields – standard WP fields, Tribe custom fields, and our own custom fields – get populated, apart from the Title of the post, which is coming over as “Unnamed Organizer” even though we’re mapping the Gravity Title field to the tribe_organizer post title. I’ve yet to understand why this is – hence my question about what the _OrganizerOrganizer field in Tribe is for.

Marcus

[Barry]

Also, we’ve noticed that the name of the Organizer seems to be duplicated in ECP in the post Title and within the custom field _OrganizerOrganizer. Can you explain the logic behind when the post Title is used, and when this custom field is used?

You’re right, and that’s a little untidy. I’ll certainly make a note for us to do something there – _OrganizerOrganizer certainly seems superfluous.

Right now though for read purposes you can treat that meta field as being an alias of the post title. Any custom code that updates or creates organizers though would however need to ensure both fields are equal.

[Marcus J Wilson]

Many thanks, Barry –

This is useful to know. However, even if we populate the post Title and _OrganizerOrganizer fields from our front end form, the post is still showing up with a Title of “Unnamed Organizer” in ECP.

There’s a fuller description of the problem at https://theeventscalendar.com/support/forums/topic/organizer-and-venue-custom-post-types-mapping-title-from-frontend-form/#post-88323, so you may want to close this thread down rather than duplicate.

Thanks!
Marcus

[Casey]

Marcus,
Upon your suggestion, I’ll go ahead and close this thread out and you can continue the discussion on the previous thread you mentioned. Thanks!

[Author]

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