Default Page Template appears to be using archive page template in child theme

[Robert Pregulman]

Hi, we have set the events calendar template to use the Default Page Template however, it appears to actually be using the archive page template and therefore does not display the calendar.

Perhaps we’re doing something wrong? We’re using the Genesis framework and a Studiopress Child theme.

Thanks in advance for your help!

[metaeitaly]

Hi! I have the same problem… Did you find a solution?
I updated to version 3.8 a few days ago, but everything worked correctly; now, suddenly and without any kind of modification, the template “full-width” was replaced by “archive page”.
Thanks for help regards.

[Casey]

seattledog,
Thanks for getting in touch and sorry to hear you’re having trouble here, but hopefully I can help. Can you try setting the page template to the ‘Default Events Template’ to see if your events display correctly after that? I’m trying to narrow down the issue to see if it’s something specific to Genesis or your Child theme.

Thanks! 🙂

-Casey-

[Casey]

metaeitaly,
If your issue is the same as the above please do feel free to monitor this thread, but if you need assistance for your own specific scenario it would be great if you could create a fresh thread of your own. Thanks!

-Casey-

[Robert Pregulman]

Hi Casey, we did try the ‘Default Events Template’ and it works however, we need a sidebar on the page we’d like the events calendar on. Therefore, that’s why we wanted to use the ‘Default Page Template’.

[Casey]

seattledog,
Since the ‘Default Events Template’ is working correctly, I would assume that this is something within your theme that’s causing a conflict, but can’t be 100% sure as I’m not familiar with this particular theme.

As a workaround, you could perform a template override (see our themer’s guide to learn more about overrides) of ‘the-events-calendar/views/default-template.php’ and then modify as needed to include your theme’s sidebar.

Alternatively, you could also reach out to the developer to see if they can provide any insight into why the Post Archive is displaying in this situation.

Give those suggestions a try and let me know if you have further questions. Thanks! 🙂

-Casey-

[Casey]

I just wanted to follow up and see if you’re all set here or if you still have further questions. Just let me know if you have further questions or if I should go ahead and close out this thread. Thanks! 🙂

-Casey-

[Robert Pregulman]

Actually, we ended up figuring it out for ourselves. I have to say we were a little disappointed that you don’t offer more support for Genesis and Studiopress users. This is a huge development platform used by a lot of people and it would have been helpful to have some step by step documentation on how to address the conflict more quickly when the theme default page didn’t work.

Your plugin has some amazing features which is why we chose it; however, the fact that it does not use shortcodes or allow access to an actual wordpress page makes simple things like adding a sidebar quite difficult. And when we asked for help from you we were simply told to go ask our theme developer at Studiopress to figure it out. And here we are paying for your premium plugin PLUS some add-ons. Hmmmm. We also found some other threads where other developers like us were asking the same question and never got a resolution from you. The easier it is for us to use with Genesis the more likely we’d be to use it again for other client sites. Not an optimal customer experience – could use improvement for sure.

Just our two cents for what it’s worth…

[Brian]

seattledog,

I understand your frustration with our support and compatibility with Genesis. I am also a Genesis user for over 4 years now and could see how some guides would help with integrating the two as it is not perfect. That does not help today, but I do have some information that may help out you or someone in the future.

Default Page Template working with Genesis
I would like to point out when using the “Default Page Template” Setting in Event > Settings > Display that if in the Genesis Settings your “Content Archive” settings is set to excerpt, the main event page will not work.The image shows that setting in Genesis.

If you set that setting to Content the Calendar will work with your default view set in the Genesis Settings.

I understand that is not always ideal to always have to set that to display full content on the archive pages so I came up with this filter for Genesis to do it.

https://gist.github.com/jesseeproductions/8d0947375b5ba10a1b5e

That works on all the view pages of The Events Calender. All you have to do is add it to your child theme’s function.php.

Archive Page
As long as I have used both Genesis and the Events Calender I have always thought Genesis treated the main event page as an Archive Page, I do not think that has been a recent change.

metaeitaly I hope this helps too.

[Rob]

Hi there seattledog! Rob from Modern Tribe here. I head up our support team and am project manager for the entire plugin suite, and was made aware of this thread a few minutes ago when Casey brought it to my attention. Since it’s clear that you’re disappointed in the level of service provided – and you raise some great points through this feedback relaying that disappointment – I wanted to jump in. You are a customer who has taken a leap of faith in us by buying our products…a failure to meet your expectations is a definite failure indeed, and I want to say right off the bat that I apologize on behalf of the whole team for your poor experience. We can (and will) do better.

Also, before going much further, I should note: this point you brought up got us talking about how we could best handle these types of Genesis-specific issues going forward. As a direct result of that conversation, we decided that our colleague Brian – who you’ll see has now taken over this thread to address any follow-up questions you might have – will be our go-to guy for all Genesis-related threads going forward. (Previously we were all dividing the load fairly evenly among the team). I realize this doesn’t make your experience so far any smoother, but know that it was your concern and the subsequent discussions which should prevent any other Genesis users in the future from sharing your disappointment.

I see Brian offered up some solutions/guidance already that may help ensure things are easier to address if the situation arises again. Was this the same resolution you ended up with? If any additional questions have arisen, definitely note them here and Brian will do his best to get you sorted.

From a higher level: you touched on some great points here. Theme framework support can definitely be a challenge to provide at times. When it comes to Genesis specifically, step-by-step documentation is a solid idea. For a while we even had a tutorial on how to best integrate with Genesis and what steps would be required, but it was only applicable to the 2.0 codebase; based on your comments I’m wondering if it isn’t time to get that updated to comply with the 3.x release. Similarly, your point on the lack of a shortcode is a 100% valid one – that’s unquestionably one of the most requested features we have. In the past it hasn’t been possible, but with some recent changes to the codebase and some further tweaks we’ve got planned, it looks like it’s finally something we’re moving on. I can’t say much about the specifics since we’re still working out some of the logistics…but I can say with a fair degree of certainty that true shortcode support is coming soon. Even more immediately, the forthcoming 3.9 release will include porting the shortcode functionality from our experimental Event Rocket add-on (https://wordpress.org/plugins/event-rocket/) into the core The Events Calendar. The broader shortcode support is likely to roll out in subsequent releases. I’m optimistic that what we end up with will be to your liking 🙂

In general, quite often with one of the many “major” theme frameworks, users are (naturally and rightfully) expecting a higher degree of compatibility. But it also is often these bigger theme frameworks that tend to deviate from certain WP development norms. In the case of Genesis specifically: it is unquestionably a solid framework. But I think it could fairly be described as “atypical” in certain respects. It doesn’t for instance appear to have a header.php or footer.php template, and looks to build everything up using hooks rather than the classic template driven approach of most themes we find ourselves supporting. This means that for us on a support level, we can’t as easily suggest users go into index.php or page.php, open it up, find get_sidebar() and do something with it. (Because in Genesis, index.php usually does exist but consists of just one function call – so the structure is very different). As that is the sort of approach that would be viable with probably 90% of themes we support, it by extension becomes the standard against which we measure. (More on the template structure, from the WP codex, can be found here in case you were interested: http://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Development#Template_File_Checklist). A framework that does things differently like this isn’t doing anything “wrong”…but it does unfortunately make us less able to spend what would inevitably be a longer amount of time researching that specific theme and a workaround for conflicts it may present.

To be clear: we try and accommodate these types of requests best we can, particularly when a solution can be identified in a 15-20 minute window. (Going forward, by simply having a “resident Genesis expert” to take on these threads, I suspect we’ll be able to help a LOT more Genesis-centric requests in that 15-20 minute window). But we also use WordPress’ default themes – those the core WP team uses as their standard – as a baseline for our development efforts. In most cases we’ve found that if the latest core WP theme and a custom theme interact with the plugin differently, there’s a good chance that the theme developer is doing something different that we’ve not accounted for. There are a number of reasons for why they would. But when that arises and it’s not a quick solution to workaround on our end, we generally view that as the responsibility of the theme dev and ask customers bring such requests to them. Conversely if a theme developers came back after looking at an issue and told us, “this is because The Events Calendar is doing X, Y and Z in the plugin codebase and it is at odds with what we consider to be coding best practices for these reasons”, we will get to work at fixing that.

All that to say: we clearly failed you here, both in terms of properly setting expectations and in terms of delivering the level of service you would expect. Please do let me know if you find – for any future Genesis issues you post – that Brian’s assistance is still not getting you to where you want to be. While we obviously won’t build customers’ sites for them, I think we can go a bit further than we did here and you have my word that we’ll do so going forward. If at any point you find to the contrary, I can always be reached directly via email at rob (@) this domain.

[Brian]

Since there is has not been any activity on this thread for over 2 weeks so I am now closing it. Feel free to start a new thread if you have further issues. Thanks! 🙂

[Author]

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