Creating mutiple templates for events and list organisers & venues

[Chris]

Hi,

This will be our third Event Calendar Pro Installation and all have had some reasonable overhead for customisation – which is why we enjoy your systems as it is quite flexible… This one I think is going to push the boundaries a little so I thought I would ask you guys if what I want to do is possible. We want to use the system for displaying the following:
1. Event Listing Page [excluding exhibitions] (unique listing page with search/filter) – will be similar to our last one you can view here: http://treasureships.com.au/agsa/all-events/
2. Event Details Page [excluding exhibitions] – will be similar to our last one you can view here: http://treasureships.com.au/agsa/event/the-navigators-studio/2015-08-14/
3. Exhibition Listing Page: These are similar to other events, however this page will be in a totally different style/design to Event Listing Page and will not have search/filter and will only list Exhibition Events
4. Exhibition Details Page: This is similar to event details page, however this page will be in a totally different style/design to Event Details Page
5. Artist Listing Page

What we are thinking about doing is using events to enter Events and Exhibitions. Then we just need some sort of filter to prevent Exhibitions appearing from any searches and listings or categories on the Event Listing Page (#1 above). The Exhibition Listing page (#3) we think will be easy enough as it will be a unique template we create that just works like a WordPress template but with the loop to only display Exhibitions.

Does all that make sense so far?

If so, then my only question thus far is what your recommendation for defining what an Exhibition is?
I assume we could just use a top level even category, or a tag, or add our own custom filed checkbox. If it’s a category then we just need to consider if it’s going to be possible to use that to filter it from visibility on event listing page and hide the category from category filters, etc.

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The second Part that I think is more straight forward is Artists. We were thinking of using the built-in Organizer system to enter and display artists. The only modifications I can see it needs is that we will need to be able to add an image to an Organizer when setting them up and we will need to be able to replace the label “Organizer” on the front end for artist, wherever it is used. Will adding an image and hiding the labels for artists (organizers) be possible without affecting core? Following that we need to do something similar that we did for Exhibitions in that artists need their own customised listing page

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And last thing we want to do is list Venues in their own template – if there’s nothing wrong with the above then I assume this is fine too 🙂 >> this would be number 6 🙂

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Can you please answer my questions above and let me know your thoughts. It all makes sense to me and doesn’t sound like it will be too much trouble but you’ll know best 🙂 It would be good to keep all this functionality within the Events Manger Pro system, rather then going out to a custom wordpress plugin to deal with Artists and Exhibitions, which is the other complete alternative. NOTE: whilst we don’t have to do much, if any cross-linking between events/venues and artists/exhibitions, if we use Event system for all of them it will give us the opportunity for that if we want to….

Thanks

• This topic was modified 10 years, 8 months ago by Chris.

[George]

Hey Chris!

There are a few questions here, obviously, so I’ll address them in order to try and maintain some organization:

Defining Exhibitions

If so, then my only question thus far is what your recommendation for defining what an Exhibition is?

This is indeed an interesting use of the Events and you’re right about there being some unique challenges to ensuring that Events and Exhibitions are kept separate.

I think you’re also right, though, about simply using an event category to label which “Events” are really “Exhibitions”. A custom checkbox would work as well, and all that, but an event category would work just as well and is already built.

The tricky part is not labeling what things are exhibitions instead of normal events – it’s keeping these exhibitions out of Events displays, and ensuring the “Exhibitions” category doesn’t show up alongside other categories used for “Events”.

In my opinion this should fortunately be easier to pull off than you might expect – each Event Category has an ID, and so anywhere where Event Categories are displaying on your site you can simply filter out the ID of the “Exhibition” category so it never displays. Similar, any place on your site where “Events” are displayed and you do not want “Exhibitions” to be included with them, you can simply run queries or filter existing ones with the pre_get_posts() WordPress filter to exclude items in the exhibition Event Category.

To learn more about filtering out items in queries by taxonomy, check out the WP_Query codex page and read through the parts about the tax_query parameters available to you → https://codex.wordpress.org/Class_Reference/WP_Query

Customizing Organizers

Will adding an image and hiding the labels for artists (organizers) be possible without affecting core?

You’re right about this set of customizations being more straightforward – you should indeed be able to customize the Organizers post type extensively without modifying core code. You can use add_post_type_support() to add thumbnail support to Organizers, which you can read about here: https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/add_post_type_support

And you can change the labels for “Organizer/s” to “Arist/s” like this:


add_filter('tribe_organizer_label_singular', 'change_single_organizer_label' );

function change_single_organizer_label() {
return 'Artist';
}

add_filter('tribe_organizer_label_plural', 'change_plural_organizer_label' );

function change_plural_organizer_label() {
return 'Artists';
}


Custom Templates for Listing Specific Things

This last section addresses a few of the comments in your post about custom templates – custom templates for Venues, like in your last question, custom listing for “Exhibitions”, etc.

The general ideas are the same for all such “custom listing templates”, and you can learn most such ideas in our Themer’s Guide here → https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/themers-guide/

You can get more involved, if need be, by writing custom queries for venues or Artists or something, or can modify queries with the aforementioned pre_get_posts() filter in WordPress, which you can learn about here: https://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Action_Reference/pre_get_posts

If you want several different templates for various types of things on your site, then this is a bit complex for the support forums but you can get fancy with WordPress’ template_redirect hook and manually route different queries to different custom templates – read more about the gist of this hook here: https://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Action_Reference/template_redirect

There’s a lot of information here but hopefully this helps – let me know what your thoughts are here and if we can help with anything else.

Cheers!
George

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