Combining multiple events into one, or preventing duplicates in events list

[Joe]

I have an event (“Holy Yoga”) at our church that has a very unusual recurrence. It happens every Monday from 9:30-10:45am, the first Wednesday of the month from 5:45-6:45pm, and the 3rd Saturday of the month from 10:30-11:30am.

I have created these as 3 separate recurring events and it’s working fine. My problem is that each of these events shows up in the upcoming events list. I appreciate the feature that only shows the next event instance for a given event, but it obviously can’t tell that these 3 events are actually the same logical entity. We’ve had a few occasions where 3 of the top 4 upcoming events in the Events List widget on our homepage are Holy Yoga. Are there any creative ways I can either combine these events into a single event with a complex recurrence, or otherwise only list the next occurrence of these three events in the Events List?

Thanks for your help!
–Joe

[Brook]

Howdy Joe,

That is a really good question. We are developing a feature of our plugin that will allow for “freeform” recurrences, where you can make recurring events in any pattern, even random ones, by adding any day to the recurrence and specifying the time. Until then, there is no easy way to do what you want.

But, you asked me to be creative. If you are feeling adventerous you could create a single recurrences for M/W/S all for 10:45am. Then trash each instance of Wednesday that isn’t the first of the month, and each Saturday that isn’t the 3rd. Then you open up your database and manually modify the start times on each Wednesday and Saturday correcting them. But this is going to be a painstaking process, and worse still later modifying the event series could cause all of the times to shift back to 10am, and you will need to redo your changes. I wish there was currently a better way.

Does that all make sense? Please let us know.

Cheers!

– Brook

[Joe]

Thanks Brook. Appreciate your help with this and your suggestion, which after some consideration, I tend to agree is a bit more daunting than I had hoped for.

It sounds like the feature you’re working on would really help me, and I look forward to seeing it. I’d love the chance to do an early alpha test of that feature, not in production but in our staging area, so I could offer feedback before it’s fully baked.

Great job with this plugin — very very nice.

Thanks again,
–Joe

[Brook]

Thank you for the offer, Joe! That’s excellent. I just added your name to our ticket. I am not sure yet if we will be doing a public beta of that feature, but if so you will definitely get included. If we end up doing a limited beta I made sure your name was on that list.

Cheers!
– Brook

[Leah]

Hello,

Thank you so much for reporting this. We are happy to tell you that a solution to this issue is part of our upcoming 3.12 release! We are doing the final testing and then the new version will be released. Keep an eye on your dashboard Updates page!

If you experience any difficulty with the update or find that the issue you reported in this thread is not resolved in 3.12, please open a new thread and we can help you. Thank you for your patience and support as we work to improve our plugins!

Best,
Leah
and The Events Calendar team

[Author]

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