Multiple day event only displayed on hours it is open

[Sindy]

Hey All,
This may be a very unique problem but I have a feeling it isn’t so I’m looking for feedback on how others in the community or staff at Tribe would handle it:

We are a city Arts Council. There are events all the time but the most difficult to deal with (and the most prevalent) are gallery art shows and here is why:
As an example: An art gallery just started a new show from October 1st to October 14th. But they’re only open Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, from 12 PM to 6 PM.

First problem) Gallery Manager enters 10/1/13 12PM to 10/14/13 6PM and doesn’t understand why it is showing up on the calendar on days and hours when they’re not open. /facepalm. Can’t fix stupid but we can fix the event, and attempt to post explanations on recurring events.

Second problem) We fix it.. Set it 10/1/13 12pm to 10/1/13 6PM, then establish reccuring on the correct days until the correct end time. This way it only shows on the calendar when the gallery is open. But now we have a mess that is complicated to administrate (and this type of thing happens constantly). And trying to explain this for community-entered content has been an absolute NIGHTMARE and ends every-time in a situation where a 2 week event is setup as reccuring event loop:
— October 1st: 1 event starting 12pm, going for two weeks, ending at 6pm.
— October 2nd: 2 clone events starting 12pm, going for two weeks, ending at 6pm.
— October 3rd: 3 clone events starting 12pm, going for two weeks, ending at 6pm.
… so on and so forth.

And really, this isn’t a recurring event: It is one event. We (and the community and art galleries) just want it displaying when the gallery is actually open.. or does that make it a recurring event? And we can do it but with headaches. And pretty much it has to be me to always do it or fix it, making community events plugin fairly useless to me haha.

While this might be a feature totally specific to the little part of the universe we’re in, it would be most helpful to pick a start date, an end date, and pick the galleries (or event hours) on those days that it is available.

Mostly just looking for feedback or if there is something simple that I’ve missed along the way. Much appreciated!

[Casey]

Marco,
I’m going to go ahead and move this thread over to the PRO forum where one of our support experts will help you over there. Please stand by.

[Barry]

Hi Marco,

I can understand that this would be frustrating and confusion over start/end dates when setting up recurring events, just to take one part of what you’re describing, isn’t altogether unusual – so we’d definitely be open to suggestions for improvement here.

That said, some users do indeed have events that span several days and also recur – so we still need to be able to facilitate that.

On a practical level, at least for community submissions, I wonder if a two-pronged approach where you 1) remove the ability to submit recurring events via the existing form and 2) build an alternative, wizard-style interface to coach people through setting up whatever kind of recurring event is typical for your organization might work or at least reduce the amount of manual intervention that is currently falling on your shoulders.

That would involve some fairly extensive customization and may not be feasible – and again all I can really do right now is leave this open to let other members of the community provide any insight based on their own experiences and also to encourage you to put forward any ideas you might have in terms of improving Community Events (or recurring event handling generally) across at tribe.uservoice.com.

Thanks!

[Sindy]

Hi Barry (and Casey for passing this along!),

Thank you for your feedback and for the uservoice link – I think I found an already established suggestion that would solve my issue… Or am I misunderstanding? (http://tribe.uservoice.com/forums/195723-feature-ideas/suggestions/3685762-random-free-form-recurring-events).

This is not how I would’ve described it but I did see a few suggestions similar to my issue that were rejected with a comment pointing to this one.

As I understand recurring events: It will create multiple entries per event depending on the start/end date and time. Is this how Tribe will always maintain recurring events or events with random times/days/etc? Multi-day events are always one listing in the backend (just to explain why I don’t think of them as the same thing… but maybe I should)

With regards to your second suggestion: I’ve seen problems with users attempting their own forms posted on these forums (like posts with wrong dates). I would be happy to try this via Gravity forms but wanted to ask if you had a specific form builder to recommend that would perhaps be more supported or you’ve had better luck with? Or were you suggesting editing the form that comes with the community events plugin?

Thanks again!

[Barry]

Hi Marco,

Let me try to answer these points in turn 🙂

I think I found an already established suggestion that would solve my issue…

Please do add your voice in the comments if you want to see this – the weight of support for ideas like this is certainly an important factor in the onward development of our plugins.

Even if we can’t build or incorporate a feature right now we would rarely dismiss outright something that there is clear demand for 🙂

As I understand recurring events: It will create multiple entries per event depending on the start/end date and time. Is this how Tribe will always maintain recurring events or events with random times/days/etc? Multi-day events are always one listing in the backend (just to explain why I don’t think of them as the same thing… but maybe I should)

That’s essentially correct. Whether you see recurring events as a good model or solution in your particular case is really something only you can decide – based on what you wrote initially I think they would be (bar user input difficulties), but there are no hard and fast rules here.

With regards to your second suggestion: I’ve seen problems with users attempting their own forms posted on these forums (like posts with wrong dates). I would be happy to try this via Gravity forms but wanted to ask if you had a specific form builder to recommend that would perhaps be more supported or you’ve had better luck with? Or were you suggesting editing the form that comes with the community events plugin?

Both.

I was thinking of modifying the existing submission form so as perhaps to no longer allow recurring event submissions (or at least point people to an alternative wizard-style recurring event builder) and then building that new form as a custom piece of work that happens to integrate with The Events Calendar.

Gravity Forms is by all accounts a great plugin and could be useful here – it all depends on what you are comfortable with and what will let you execute an idea like this with the least amount of effort.

People have indeed fallen into difficulties doing this sort of thing before but that isn’t because it’s impossible so much as perhaps (at least in some cases) they were following an out-of-date tutorial that was written before the advent of Community Events. It’s true also that the support we can offer for such customizations is limited in the extreme – as a developer it is your responsibility, or at least the responsibility of the developer you work with – to figure out the details.

I hope that provides a little more clarification.

Thanks!

[Support Droid]

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