Events Shared Between Calendars / Sites

[CASC-OR]

We’re evaluating WordPress as a whole and Event Calendar Pro specifically and have a question about “shared events”.

Our structure will either be

http://www.ourdomain.com
http://www.ourdomain.com\sub1
http://www.ourdomain.com\sub2

OR

http://www.ourdomain.com
sub1.ourdomain.com
sub2.ourdomain.com

We would like to be able to categorize events to appear on different calendars

1) On all domains and “sub” locations
2) On one “sub” location only
3) On some “sub” locations but not all

We would like a method of creating events where they only have to be created once then can be assigned to various calendars.

How could this be done using Event Calendar Pro?

Does using subdomains make a difference? (and I am guessing it would since I think using subdomains would dictate multiple WP database instances)

[George]

Hey @CASC-OR,

Thanks for reaching out and for the interesting question—I’m sorry to bear this news, but our calendar plugins do NOT have the sort of functionality you describe here 🙁

The only feasible way to build the sort of multi-calendar and event-assigning functionality you describe would be to write custom code that does this. Thanks for reaching out. The features you are trying to implement are possible, but would unfortunately require many code customizations to implement 🙁

So to implement the features you describe, you would have to write that custom code or hire a professional developer to write the code for you. We have a list of great developers here → http://m.tri.be/18k1 (and have no affiliation with any of these folks–they’re simple some well-respected names in the community that we’ve compiled to share in situations like this one).

I hope this information helps!

— George

[CASC-OR]

I think your answer is as I’d expect for multiple instances of WP but in the first instance, I’m presuming (and I should have made this clearer) that I have one instance of WP and http://www.ourdomain.com\sub1 is simply a page there.

That being the case, I could use event categories to filter what gets displayed on calendars and select multiple event categories to display on multiple calendars, right?

As an aside, is there a reason the Event Calendar has its own set of categories instead of using the categories from Posts?

[George]

Hey CASC-OR,

Thanks for your follow-up; apologies for not addressing the question you described here in depth:

I could use event categories to filter what gets displayed on calendars and select multiple event categories to display on multiple calendars, right?

When it comes to the first part of your question, the answer is “Yes.” Categories can be used to filter items that are displaying on calendars.

The problem, however, arises with the notion of “multiple calendars.” Even if you are on the same single website, The Events Calendar and its add-ons currently only support the one main calendar generated by the plugin. This calendar is usually generated at example.com/events, though you can change the slug where this is generated by changing the aptly-named “Events Slug” option in your Events Settings.

So, in other words:
• Support for filtering by categories? Yes.
• Support for multiple calendars, even on one website? No.
• Support filtering across multiple calendars, therefore: No 🙁

I’m sorry to bear this news!

In closing, the choice to use a custom taxonomy instead of default Post Categories is one motivated by a number of factors. The biggest reason is simply that, most people—by far—have “Events” content and “Posts” content on their site wholly separate from each other. So using the same taxonomies for two silos of content that are otherwise never related does not make sense as a default, ‘out-of-the-box’ option.

I highlighted the “default, out-of-the-box” part here because this is just the most common situation; if using Post Categories would make sense for you, you can add Post Categories to events by adding the following line of code to your theme’s functions.php file:


register_taxonomy_for_object_type( 'category', 'tribe_events' );


You can learn more about that function here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/register_taxonomy_for_object_type.

I hope all of this helps! Let me know if so and if there’s anything else I can try to help with or address.

Sincerely,
George

[CASC-OR]

First, thanks for your explanation!

I think I’ve again not been clear – instead of saying multiple calendars, I should have been saying one calendar with multiple views of subsets of the events on it based on categories. And I’ve already managed to make that work using the free version.

A little context might help here – we are a motorsports sanctioning body which has four distinct competition divisions. We use categories to group content under the division to which it applies. We’d like to have a global calendar view with all our events shown, and divisional calendar views which show only the events for a given division.

If we can use one taxonomy across multiple content types (of which events would be one) that eases the maintenance efforts.

Thanks for the tip about the function. That would work for my purposes.

I’m still in the process of evaluating whether WP would be suitable for our needs – we have been on Drupal for five years and are due for an upgrade so it’s a good time for us to review alternatives. But The Event Calendar looks like it would be a solution to our calendaring requirements.

[George]

Thank you again for your further elaboration here. I definitely understand your aims a bit better and our products should quite work well for the sort of task you describe here:

We’d like to have a global calendar view with all our events shown, and divisional calendar views which show only the events for a given division.

The “global” calendar is the main calendar with no filters applied to it; however, once you start filtering by categories, the view itself will indeed update to only show the filtered results, and you can link directly to such “filtered” views so that you, in essence, sort-of “fake” the appearance of multiple different calendars, but in reality it’s just the same set of calendar views with various event information being withheld from some based on the active category filter.

I hope this elaboration of my own doesn’t make things more confusing—let me know if so or if there’s anything else I can try to help with here!

Sincerely,
George

[Support Droid]

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If you still need assistance please simply open a new topic (linking to this one if necessary)
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