Excerpt text – line break, paragraph and text format.

[Joseph]

I have been using The Events Calendar plug-in for WordPress and really like it. In fact, I like it so much I have decided to pay and upgrade it to the paid Pro version. I have just downloaded and installed the PRO version of the Events Calendar plug-in and am looking forward to using it. One thing I can’t seem to figure out is how to enter paragraphs and line breaks on text I place in the Excerpt box. In other words as I am entering an event I would like to enter some text in the Excerpt box but wish to display some of this text in separate lines or even separate paragraphs so that it looks cleaner and more organized. I also can’t seem to alter text attributes such as bold or italics. How can I force text in the Excerpt box to move to the next line and how can I also separate text in two separate paragraphs ? How can I change the attributes of text in the Excerpt box ? I have tried, for instance, to use regular html code such as but it doesn’t seem to work. Thank you, Joseph.

[Casey D]

Hello drjchamberlain,

Thanks for upgrading!

Overall this seems to be an issue with the WordPress implementation of ‘excerpts’ and is not a direct problem of our plugin.

Here is a post that is pretty old, but shares some more info

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6260928/how-to-include-html-tags-within-a-wordpress-excerpt

http://codex.wordpress.org/Excerpt

I did some quick tests and was able to add newlines and some html to my Excerpt box just fine however.

Can you offer more specifics about your situation? Maybe it is a conflict with a plugin or theme?

Cheers!

– Casey Driscoll

[Joseph]

This reply is private.

[Casey D]

Thanks for the update.

Best I can tell, you shouldn’t have to add any additional formatting to the Excerpt box, it should store html just fine. The difference comes later when trying to access it.

From what I can see, all views have a slightly different way of displaying the excerpt.

The List View shows it 100% complete.

 

The Day and Photo Views convert the newlines to spaces

 

The Month and Week view (with the tooltips) strip out all html

 

 

To stop this formatting from happening, you will unfortunately have to create a template override (even then I’m not entirely sure it is possible). If you check out our Themer’s Guide, you could probably make a template override to display what you want. For the month view, check out the instructions in the view/month/single-event.php. The comments are loaded with information on how to edit the template files.

 

1. The formatting of the columns in the full page event layout is not right or symmetrical. I have a featured image above, then below it I have two columns for Details (left) and Organizer (right) but these columns are not centered. Below I have two other columns for Venue (left) and a Google map (right). In addition to the arrangement not being even the website links are too long and don’t wrap where they should towards the next line.

 

For the symmetry of the Event Details section, you will have to create some custom css, as unfortunately that level of customization goes beyond the scope of the forums. As far as customizations go though, that should relatively easy to tweak.

 

2. The featured image appears differently in the pop-up box (when the mouse hovers over the event) and in the full page event as the header of the page. I am using 1040×345 images because they seem to fill the entire width of the page and work as headers. However, in the pop-up boxes they become square and only a portion is displayed. The portion displayed is often not the part I would like to have displayed. Is it possible to change this ? Can I have two different featured images, one for the pop-up boxes and one for the full page event information ?

This is more customization that goes beyond the scope of the forums I’m afraid. I believe the smaller plugin is using the ‘thumbnail’ size, which you can set in the Settings > Media section. You can only have one featured image per event or post, but if you uncheck the crop mechanism your thumbnails should look better.

 

Does this make sense? Let me know if this doesn’t work for you.

Cheers!

– Casey Driscoll

[Joseph]

This reply is private.

[Rob]

Hi Joseph! Casey brought this thread to my attention, and I wanted to step in to try and get you a reply that shed some light on our support process and why we unfortunately have to defer certain types of support requests. I’ll say right off the bat that by not properly communicating these limitations to you early on in the process, we’ve failed you – and I apologize on behalf of the whole team for that. I know what it’s like to be working with a plugin or piece of code that you’re struggling to get integrated; it sucks, and is compounded when you reach out for help and feel that you aren’t getting it.

Right off the bat: I just met with the team to review how you might be able to maintain your custom crafted excerpts, since I want to make sure we’re doing right by you on this. Ultimately – while it’s a hack to workaround – you should be able to accomplish your goals by doing an override of month/single-event.php and replacing the existing code with this: https://gist.github.com/roblagatta/9de92d07773a761d4fd8. Hope that’ll help address your excerpt concerns. I agree it’s a good point that these should probably be consistent across all views, excerpt perhaps the tooltips. We have some code in place that aims to preserve the integrity of the content – people adding images via HTML, for example, could cause weird issues on various views – but it’s possible we could be more flexible here. At the very least, I’ve got this on the radar to discuss with the dev team and see if they have ideas for improvement we could integrate into a subsequent release.

Regarding your comment on the columns: I can definitely see what you’re going for, and the reason you’d want to achieve centered content, but I’m not sure I ultimately agree with your assessment that this is a flaw. The columns not being symmetrical to the extent you’re requesting is by design. I’m not sure what basis there is to say it’s bad/wrong? We definitely have mechanisms in place for users to change this if they’d like to, though – the single event view can be overridden and customized entirely. But at the end of the day we have to give users the tools and resources to make these changes themselves, rather than being able to write the code for them. We’re also happy to refer folks to outside developers (we have a list of freelancers we can share) if they’re looking for help outside the scope of the forums.

All that to say: sorry we let you down. You’re in good hands here with Casey going forward, and I’m hoping the information I’ve presented above and Casey’s subsequent reply are helpful. If at any point you are finding you aren’t being served to the extent you should be, or just have other feedback you’d like to pass along, please don’t hesitate to let me know directly (rob @ tri.be).

[Casey D]

Hello drjchamberlain,

Let me know if there is anything I can help with! I think this image may convey our design intentions.

– Casey Driscoll

[Joseph]

This reply is private.

[Joseph]

This reply is private.

[Joseph]

This reply is private.

[Casey D]

Hello drjchamberlain,

I’m afraid you will have to get your hands dirty in some CSS for the wrapping and column customizations you want to make. We simply don’t have the resources to help build every customer’s website, and as such, those customizations go beyond the scope of the forums.

A plugin like http://wordpress.org/plugins/simple-custom-css/ will help you add css to your site. There are many great and free CSS tutorials online, and CSS is a very easy and powerful web language to learn. It will be well worth your time to learn how to increase the width of a column, for instance.

There is no problem with the Excerpts, especially the tooltips, as they are specifically designed to maintain consistency across the site. Our support manager even gave you a gist of code to start customization of your tooltips. To customize the tooltips with the gist, you will have to read through the Themer’s Guide to make any customizations you want. The gist code works in conjunction with the month/single-event.php file, and the instructions in there are lengthy and explicit.

Please open up a new topic about your map issue. If you could please detail in your own words exactly what your problem is (instead of just linking here), that will go a long way towards helping you get this issue resolved as fast as possible. I hope you understand our reasoning here and do not mind this extra step, we have just found it serves our users best.

Best,

– Casey Driscoll

[Joseph]

This reply is private.

[Rob]

Hi Joseph — thanks for the follow-up here. This is incredibly disappointing. I’ve replied to your last comment via email; let’s keep the discussion going there. As noted in my email: this is not the type of behavior that is at all acceptable in our community. I’ve already asked Casey to close this thread as well.

[Author]

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