Cost and Description Fields Missing from Community EVents List View

[Ben]

When you have many community event submitters you need an efficient way for an admin to review all the PENDING posts BEFORE they are published to the calendar. The regular calendar views won’t help with this, because the pending events won’t appear there.

What is needed is a list that includes all the fields of submitted community events that are pending (in particular cost and description, which do not now appear in the review list) so they can be quickly reviewed and edited if necessary prior to publishing. Using the admin panel requires the admin to individually open every pending event to check cost and description because they do not appear in any WP or Community Events list. Try to manage a Community Events calendar with lots of events on it (ours typically has over 100 each month), and you will understand what I’m talking about.

IMHO, this is a design oversight which could be resolved very simply by including the cost and description fields in the /events/community/list/ view. If you feel the description field is potentially too long, then just list an excerpt so the reviewer will at least know which items to look at in more detail rather than having to step through every item to see the cost and description fields. Or you could just display a link on the items with a description and have a pop-up with the full field contents. That is what I am requesting–the basic ability to review pending events–not a new feature.

BTW, you have the description field set “required” by default, which mean users have to put dummy information into the field, and then have to open every single pending item to be able to see the dummy information. IMHO this is a usability bug and should be fixed ASAP.

Can you please try the use model I have described (with 100 community events), and then tell me if you think the current product is usable?

Thanks
Gene

[Andras]

Hi Gene,

Thank you for reaching out! I have to say I really enjoyed reading your post. Thank you for your valuable insights and feedback.

While we are developing the plugins we do a lot of testing for bugs, and some different scenarios. Of course, it is nearly impossible to test all use cases that are out there in the wild, that is why feedback like yours are much appreciated.

I have some experience with different plugins and how their admin looks like, and I totally understand your frustration. Fortunately I might have a solution that could work for you. It involves using our Advanced Post Manager plugin, which you can download for free from the WordPress plugin repo. You can go ahead and download it, but don’t just activate it yet. First, go through these steps:

1. Go to Events in your WordPress admin and open the Screen Options in the top right.
2. Tick all the columns to be visible and switch the View Mode to Excerpt View. And hit Apply.
   https://cloudup.com/cmMiHQdbXYF
3. Go to your Plugins and now activate Advanced Post Manager
4. Go back to your Events and on the top of the list you will see a new box with Filters & Columns. Here, on the right side you can activate and deactivate additional columns, including Event cost. Hit Apply.
5. If you want you can also create separate filters for filtering your list based on different event properties, and you can save these filters to be used in the future with one click.

 

I really do hope this will help make reviewing your pending events less tedious and maybe a bit more fun. 🙂 If not fun, then at least a bit easier to manage.

I would be happy to hear how this works out for you.

Cheers,
Andras

[Ben]

Thanks, that really helps. I hate to be picky, but my website users are really clambering for an easy way to review submitted events. Is there any way to make the event list (in the admin panel) show date and time, like it does in the community events show list (instead of just date). Then we would have all the review information in one place. Thanks for your help!

[Ben]

P.S. Is there a reason that start and end times don’t appear as options in the active columns choice list? That would make it easy 😉

[Andras]

Hi Gene,

That, indeed, is a question I was wondering myself. I posted the question to our developers but didn’t receive a reply yet. I’ll keep you posted.

Cheers,
Andras

[Ben]

In looking at the meta data in the WP database, it appears that event start and end times are stored as part of the start and end date as DATETIME fields. Would it be possible to just change the display format for the tribe admin list view so that the date columns appear as a date/time values? That would allow us to see all the info we need to review the community calendar submissions from the extended admin view that you described above.

Thanks
Gene

[Andras]

Hello Gene,

One of our devs was kind enough to put together this snippet. It adds the starting time after the date.
Just paste it in your theme’sfunctions.php file.


function events_admin_add_start_time( $column_id, $post_id ) {
if ( Tribe__Events__Main::POSTTYPE !== get_post_type( $post_id ) ) return;
if ( 'start-date' !== $column_id ) return;

$time = tribe_get_start_date( $post_id, true, get_option( 'time_format' ) );
echo " <span class='event-start-time'>@ $time </span> ";
}
add_action( 'manage_posts_custom_column', 'events_admin_add_start_time', 20, 2 );


Based on this you should be able to do it for the end time as well, if you need it.

Let me know if this helps.

Cheers,
Andras

[Ben]

Close. I’ve attached the HTML output for the events list page.

If I take out the span tag, the output looks like this:
@ 8:00 pm November 4

So evidently the span is needed to group the arguments properly, but I am unable to determine the correct code.

[Andras]

Hi Gene,

That’s interesting. I tried copy-pasting the code from here and it works flawlessly on my test site.

The only thing I can think of, do you maybe have any other plugin or code that could influence the admin interface?

A.

[Ben]

Thanks Andras, I went through and disabled all plugins except ECP and activated them one-by-one. Now it works–go figure.

I’m very thankful for this patch. It will help us tremendously. But it looks a little funky in that all day events are shown as start time=12:00am and end time=11:59pm. Events with no end time show the end time=start time rather than showing now end time.

For future versions you might want to either provide a view specifically for admin review and editing within Community Events. Or alternatively, enhance the admin events view to show all the needed info for review (i.e., include cost, start time, end time, and description). Or update Advanced Post Manager to enable this (start and end time are not currently available). It would make the Community Events add-on appear more thought out and professional.

As I said at the beginning of this thread, without some enhancement of this type, reviewing a large number of events submitted to Community Events is really a drag.

Best regards and thankful for your help!
Gene

[Andras]

Gene, thanks a lot for your feedback!
I’m happy we managed to work it all out.

A specific view for admin review sounds like a good idea. If you think that is something you would like as a feature I encourage you to visit our User Voice Page and either upvote an existing request or make a new request there.

Since this is marked resolved I am going to close this ticket, but if you need anything else related to this topic or another please post a new one on the forum and we can help you out.

Cheers,
Andras

PS: If you like our plugin, we would be happy to receive a review in the wordpress.org repository. Thanks!

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