month selector and previous/next month and year view

[Bob]

I’m looking for a calendar that displays more like a calendar with a month selector, year (and next year) and previous/next to move around in the future. I don’t see those features with the free version, how about with Pro?

Tx

[Geoff]

Hi Bob,

The navigation for Month View is actually the same between The Events Calendar and Events Calendar PRO. While there are no dropdown menus for months and years, there is a datepicker included in the search bar that allows visitors to navigate through time.

Cheers!
Geoff

[Bob]

First thing first – I appreciate the time/effort that it takes to develop a calendar application. I’d imagine that hundreds of hours are involved, underappreciated hours. In my back pocket I carry a wallet full of unpaid consulting.

That being said, however, as a visitor viewing a calendar being able to page back/forth through time is something that is really useful, also accessing a year view (less critical).

Even if no events are scheduled you want to be able to page forward. I figured out that next month does not display at the bottom unless an event is scheduled, same for the fuutre. That’s a little strange. You can’t click through years to get somewhere fast.

People want to be able to do navigate with minimal effort and quickly. After I added an event in November and it displays at the bottom, I have to scroll to the bottom click on the month, the page then takes about 3 seconds to load. That feels slow, but then to continue to move forward I once again have to scroll to the bottom of the page to find the next month – which isn’t there. That’s a lot of moving around to end up scratching your head.

Calendar navigation belongs at the top of a page, IMHO, less aggravation to the viewer. Consider my suggestions in a future release.

In the event that I wanted to add some hacked navigation at the top of the page using PHP, can you point me to which file(s) I would need to mess with?

Thx, Bob

[Geoff]

Hi Bob,

Thanks a ton for the kind words. 🙂 It does indeed take a team here that puts thousands of hours into each release and knowing that you appreciate that effort makes us smile. Thanks!

I do totally understand and appreciate the need for a specific header that would cater to a specific audience. That would be a possibility with custom development. While I don’t have a tutorial on hand, we do have a Themer’s Guide that outlines the process for creating custom layouts with the calendar as well as a collection of handy functions that are available for reference.

The specific area you will likely want to work with is referred to as the “bar” which is the very top navigation of the calendar. There is a template available that can be used to override the default “bar” and is located in the plugin files at: /src/views/modules/bar.php.

Note that the file is available and ready in the free version of the plugin and PRO is not needed at all to work on that. In fact, if you hit any questions while working on it, please do feel free to hit us up in the open source forum and we’d be happy to help as best we can on our next pass.

Cheers!
Geoff

[Bob]

I was going to try to do something cute like using a dropdown selector or a bootstrap dropdown button menu but I scratched both and made up a simple horizontal list of links in bar.php.

<?php
echo “<p class=’text-center no-underline’ style=’margin-top: 20px;’>Month: “;
for ( $i = 0; $i <= 12 ; $i++ )
{
$next = date(‘Y-m’,strtotime(“+$i months”));
$m = date(‘M’,strtotime(“+$i months”));
$title = date(‘M/Y’,strtotime(“+$i months”));
echo “$m “;
}
echo “</p>”;

?>

I also set a calendar entry many years in the future so that we don’t accidentally click a month that doesn’t exist. Thx.

[Geoff]

Heck yeah! Nice work and thanks for sharing that here in the forums. I’ll check it out myself because I could see that being useful down the road for other customers as well. 🙂

Cheers!
Geoff

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