Event Metadata + List View completely disastrous for Recurring Events

[Inbok]

Hi,

We bought Calendar Pro and Tickets Plus two months ago and we’re still not satisfied with either. We’ve decided to scrap and give up on Tickets Plus altogether since the way it handled tickets for recurring events was poor.

The main selling point of Calendar Pro is support for recurring events. I would not have bought it if I knew this support for recurring events was only surface-level, only really works for the Month View, and requires a ton of customization to work properly for typical use cases like scheduling recurring workshops.

So we’re using Calendar Pro to display when our workshops occur. They always occur in series (e.g. every Tuesday 1-2pm until [end date]). As a result, we’ve set these events up as recurring events in the plugin.

Now, this looks fine and as intended on the Month view.

But on the Events page (single-event.php) and the List view, it is a confusing disaster that breaks every UI/UX rule in the book. One of the things that is just plain awful of how this works is that there is no easy, intuitive way for customers to know what event is part of what recurring series since every event is listed as its own event and looks exactly the same, and the event metadata just lists the single date, not a date range as expected. There is some hoverable text near the event title “Recurring Event (All)” but it is nowhere close to being user-friendly and our customers won’t use it nor understand it.

Basically, as far as recurring events are concerned, every part except the Month view has an extremely bad user experience and this is frustrating for both myself, who spent more than $200 and two months on your products, and my customers, who think the website is a mess. I want to move forward with your product if I can, but my patience is running thin.

So I’ve copied single-event.php, and modules/details.php to the child theme in preparation for making edits.

I need:

a) A way to make the event meta show the date range of the event series (so first date, and end date, with a dash in-between), rather than only the date on which the event occurs.

b) A way to prominently display recurrence (e.g. if an event has a recurrence of every Tuesday, 1-2pm, I’d like to add to event metadata a function that returns these recurrence rules. If there is no such function, something like returning the number of events in the series would be fine.)

c) A way to completely remove “child events” in a series from appearing in List View, but not on Month View. This means only the first event in a series displays in List View, while all events appear on Month View. We’ve decided that completely removing the “child events” from the list view is better than showing every single event in a huge list with no way to tell what event is part of which series.

Thanks,

[Geoff B.]

Good evening Inbok and welcome back!

Thank you for taking the time to provide us with some very insightful feedback in spite of your dissatisfaction. This absolutely helps us grow and improve.

I certainly can appreciate how the experience you have had so far can be very frustrating.
Our apologies for that as this was certainly not our intention.

I would like to offer answers to some of your concerns.

The main selling point of Calendar Pro is support for recurring events. I would not have bought it if I knew this support for recurring events was only surface-level, only really works for the Month View, and requires a ton of customization to work properly for typical use cases like scheduling recurring workshops.

I see what you mean. You are right, there is clearly room for improvement on many levels, including UI/UX. I have to say you have offered some very good suggestions to achieve that.

As you have pointed out, for the moment, we provide recurring event information in the most simple way possible in each view.

But we made sure to provide full template override capabilities via our themer’s guide.
This actually is something a lot of theme developers appreciate since it allows them to get each view exactly the way they want it.

With that in mind, Avada has in fact seriously tweaked each of the list view and the single day view. If you get the chance, I would recommend temporarily switching back to a default WordPress theme such as twenty-sixteen and look at these views.

So perhaps undoing some of Avada’s /tribe-events/ customizations might be something worth considering, if you like what you see in the default layout better.

a) A way to make the event meta show the date range of the event series (so first date, and end date, with a dash in-between), rather than only the date on which the event occurs.

I will ask one of our snippet ninja for this. Hang tight as I do that.

 

b) A way to prominently display recurrence (e.g. if an event has a recurrence of every Tuesday, 1-2pm, I’d like to add to event metadata a function that returns these recurrence rules. If there is no such function, something like returning the number of events in the series would be fine.)

Here is something that should bet you started on the right track. Try the following version of details.php: https://gist.github.com/GeoffEW/719381f0a19bd1f9298de074f68a160a

You can drop it in /your-theme/tribe-events/modules/meta/

c) A way to completely remove “child events” in a series from appearing in List View, but not on Month View. This means only the first event in a series displays in List View, while all events appear on Month View. We’ve decided that completely removing the “child events” from the list view is better than showing every single event in a huge list with no way to tell what event is part of which series.

You can accomplish this via the Recurring event instances setting under Events -> Settings -> General.

Best regards,

Geoff B.

[Geoff B.]

Hey Inbok,

As promised, I have relayed your great suggestions to the product team.
This will come in handy as we review and improve the way we handle recurring events in the next improvement phases.

I also touched base with our coding ninjas about point A on your list. Here is the answer I received:

There is kind of a lot of complicated logic that goes into showing dates, because the format changes depending on whether or not there is an end time, if it’s an all day event, and if the end day is different than the start day, or if it’s some combination of these. Depending on what they want they might need to write their own complicated logic.

The good news is that these changes would be done in the same details.php file we are already working on for customization.

You might find this function handy, this is the function that generates the date format located in the header of the event: https://theeventscalendar.com/function/tribe_events_event_schedule_details/

It is one line and separates the dates by a dash. But it includes the time, and you might not want that. If you like how the header is formatted, I would encourage them to replace the entire section of code in that file with just a call to this function.

In other words, you are already pretty close to success and I would totally encourage you to pursue your efforts. However, I unfortunately do not have a ready-made snippet or template override to accomplish what you are looking for.

Let me know how that goes.

Best regards,
Geoff B.

[Support Droid]

Hey there! This thread has been pretty quiet for the last three weeks, so we’re going to go ahead and close it to avoid confusion with other topics. If you’re still looking for help with this, please do open a new thread, reference this one and we’d be more than happy to continue the conversation over there.

Thanks so much!
The Events Calendar Support Team

[Author]

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