Greater functionality for venues

[Shannon]

Recently our horse club met to plan out our events for the year. A few things that were troublesome for us were:
– we can’t choose weekends where people in our particular sport might be attending a similar event elsewhere (eg. barrel racing). It would be nice to know what other clubs were planning similar events and when.
– we needed a venue that has: both an outdoor and indoor arena, kitchen facilities for our concession; ample parking for many trucks/trailer rigs; pens available to board the horses overnight.
– etc. etc.

I looked at several solutions for WordPress. I chose The Events Calendar because it was the only one that I found that displayed a nice list of events on the month view of the calendar. Other solutions only highlight the date/square if there is an event(s). Bonus – yours let’s you hover over each item and event details are shown in the pop-up! LOVE IT!!

Issue one – taxonomy: I am finding that the functionality for venues is very limited. There is no taxonomy for them. I was able to use a plugin that allows for adding custom taxonomies. I can now, for example, sort venues by “has kitchen” or “has sound system,” and display them as a list. Unfortunately, these options are shown when posting an event. It’s just one big list now – event categories and the new venue taxonomy categories. But I can live with that. Very soon I will monetize the site as this is a much-needed resource for our industry. So the long list will be confusing to users.

Issue two – map view of venues (and filtering): I would like to display all venues on a map. I found your post regarding a shortcode for this ( [tribe_venue_map] ), and added the snippet to my functions.php file. It works great but 3 things – when the map loads, it is a world map. Is there a way to make the map know the location of the visitor and make that the default zoom level for them? Also, there is no way to filter the venues. Thirdly, when you click on the map marker, the title of the venue shows up, but it is not clickable. It would be great if the title was hyperlinked to the venue’s page.

I may have to install a separate “directory” plugin, and duplicate the venues. I am a “plugin minimalist” 🙂 and don’t want to do that unless it’s absolutely necessary!

Sorry for the long post. Hope you didn’t doze off while reading… 🙂

[Jaime Marchwinski]

Hi Shannon,

Thanks so much for reaching out!

It sounds like you have found a workable solution for issue with taxonomies related to venues, which is great.

Unfortunately adding categories to venues is not something that is available out of the box, but you could add them via a customization or possibly with a third-party plugin (in case you wanted to try a different one). I did a quick search and found this one, but I have not tested it out.

Our themer’s guide is the place to start if you’d like to do the customization, or we also have a list of recommended developers if you’d like to get help with the code.

At this time, there is no way for the map to know the location of the user.  You can try changing the default zoom under Events Settings < General and see if that helps.

You mention that there is no way to filter the venues, how were you looking to filter the venues.  You may also be interested in adding on our Filter Bar plugin, which can provide you with some more advanced filtering capabilities.

It would be great if the title was hyperlinked to the venue’s page.

You may also be able to make this customization possible on your own with our Themer’s Guide, which I linked to above.

You can also add these ideas to our Feature Requests, as we tend to implement ideas based on customer feedback, so your input is greatly appreciated:

https://tribe.uservoice.com/forums/195723-feature-ideas

Let me know if you have any other questions on this topic!

 

Thanks,

Jaime

[Shannon]

Thanks

[Jaime Marchwinski]

Glad we could help, you are welcome back in our support forums any time!

Since you marked this thread as Resolved, I am going to close this thread.

Have a great week!

[Author]

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