How to insert header

[George Pytlik]

I’m really frustrated with a serious limitation of the Events Calendar. It uses either the Events Calendar template or the theme’s default page template. There is no way to create a special page to set up the look of the calendar pages.

The reason this is an issue is that many themes now use the featured image OF THE PAGE as the header graphic for that page. It might splash across the whole top of the screen with the logo and menu appearing against the image.

But because the Events Calendar doesn’t use a page, I have no control over that header graphic. It ends up being blank. On several of my sites, the entire header area is just a big white box because it’s looking for a graphic that can’t exist because the template itself doesn’t have one unless I custom-code the theme functionality which is a major headache and would break the next time I update the theme. This means that the calendar pages have a white logo and white menu against a white background. You see nothing in the whole top of the screen.

I would really like to see the Events Calendar allow us to apply a shortcode to an existing page, allowing the calendar content to then pop into that page. This way we could just insert something like [calendar] into the page where I wanted the calendar stuff to show.

Short of that, does any one have an easy fix for this very annoying shortcoming? How can I force the Events Calendar to use a specific image as the Featured image?

[Barry]

Hi @adwiz,

I’m sorry to hear this has been a source of such frustration and can definitely sympathize.

I would really like to see the Events Calendar allow us to apply a shortcode to an existing page, allowing the calendar content to then pop into that page. This way we could just insert something like [calendar] into the page where I wanted the calendar stuff to show.

That’s been proposed by others and I’d encourage you to up-vote the idea. However, it’s no small undertaking to implement this and realistically it’s difficult even to approximate when this might become available.

Short of that, does any one have an easy fix for this very annoying shortcoming? How can I force the Events Calendar to use a specific image as the Featured image?

Themes that provide this sort of functionality often provide a hook to facilitate making changes for scenarios like this one – have you checked in with the theme vendor on that count?

As a hypothetical example, suppose they determine the URL of the header image like this:

$header_img_url = apply_filters( 'my_theme_header_img', $url, $post_id );

You could then write some code along these lines to tweak it:

add_filter( 'my_theme_header_img', function( $url ) {
    if ( ! tribe_is_month() || ! tribe_is_list() ) return $url;
    else return 'http://some-custom/image.jpg';
} );

With that in mind, which theme are you using?

Though the level of official assistance we can provide for theme integration issues is limited, perhaps another member of the community will be familiar with the same theme as you are using?

[George Pytlik]

Thanks for the quick and helpful reply. As a former Mac programmer and web developer, I certainly do understand the difficulty of creating a shortcode structure for such a complex plugin. So I don’t expect it any time soon. But it should be considered.

I’m using the Salient theme by ThemeNectar for six of the 116 websites I’ve built, because it’s one of my favorite themes overall. Several of those sites use the Events Calendar and two of them use the Pro version, which is why this is getting so frustrating. I’ve talked to ThemeNectar and they do have great support but they didn’t really offer much of a response.

But I’ve encountered pretty much the same issue with other themes and that’s why I posted about it.

[Barry]

Definitely – we are indeed giving very serious consideration to shortcode based embedding.

Until that happens, though, the difficulty on our side remains that all of these themes do things differently.

There are different hooks for each theme and some may not offer any hooks, meaning a different approach (like a template override) would be needed – so regrettably we can’t offer up a one-size-fits-all answer in situations like this.

Let’s leave this open for the time being though and if there are other users who are familiar with Salient it’s possible they’ll be able to assist 🙂

[Support Droid]

This topic has not been active for quite some time and will now be closed.

If you still need assistance please simply open a new topic (linking to this one if necessary)
and one of the team will be only too happy to help.

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