Newb Questions/Problems

[Cindy]

Let me preface my questions with letting you know I am very new to WordPress and The Event Calendar. This is all a huge learning curve for me so please bear with me.

My website is hidden behind a coming soon plugin so I will have to deactivate that if you need to see my calendar to assess my problems:

1) I’m fairly certain that when I first set up my calendar and had added a new event the words “Calendar of Events” showed at the top of the calendar. However, now that I have several more events added, I see one of my events as the title of the Calendar. (This could be due to the many times I added events, deleted events, removed a menu page, readded a menu page and so on. I told you I’m new to this.)

2) I wanted to have the Calendar display on a full width page and I managed to get it on a full page using the “default Events Template), but it had a vertical line running down the right side of the page–apparently where the sidebar would normally begin. But line or no line, when I click on an event, the page it goes to is also full width, which I would not want. I would prefer the event page to be a regular page with sidebar. Is this possible? (I can live with keeping the calendar on a regular page with sidebar if need be.)

3) On the Event List view, the information listed to the right (start/end date, venue, etc.) has a white background. Is there a place to change that?

4) On the detail event page, is there a way to disable the “Updated: ” line?

5) Also on the detail event page, is there a way to remove or disable the “Schedule: “? This shows on recurring events and it’s rather ugly to see, “Every week for 52 weeks.” Is there a better way to do this?

6) Again, on the detail event page, below the event information and the Google Calendar/Ical Import links there are two links from my calendar. There is one on the left and one on the right. I assume they are events before and after the event being shown. This doesn’t always appear to be the case and it doesn’t look right. Is there a way to disable this from showing?

My apologies if these are answered elsewhere. I’m gladly take directions on where to find answers/solutions/help.

[Rob]

Hi Cindy! Happy to help here. I’ll answer each of these below, as best I can.

#1. Adding/removing events or menu items shouldn’t change the title of the calendar itself. You haven’t added anything to the before/after HTML fields on the settings page, have you? If not, any chance I could get a screenshot or a link to where I can see this on my end?
#2. You could do this, but it’d require a template override (the process of which is detailed in the FAQ on this site or the readme.txt file). It’s a somewhat tricky process for a non-dev so you may want to get someone with development expertise to assist there…
#3. This could also be done but would require a template override.
#4. Unfortunately, we need to keep this enabled in order for the events to have full impact from an SEO standpoint. We were able to disable the “Updated” in the widgets, but for regular event listings it unfortunately has to remain.
#5. This is hardcoded in for any recurring events; the only way to remove it would be to create a recurring series, then make modifications to each item in that series and when prompted, make sure you’re only updating this event (instead of all future events) so it breaks it out of the recurrence accordingly. Of course, upon doing so, that event will be standalone and no longer recurring.
#6. This should always show the next event and previous event, as you noted. However I haven’t received any reports of it either not appearing or showing the wrong links. Any examples you can provide? As an aside, these too could likely be disabled doing a template override.

Hope that helps! Please let me know if you have any follow-up questions.

[Cindy]

Thank you for your reply, Rob. I’m afraid much of what you said doesn’t help me much without step by step instructions, so I’m resigned to just dealing with #1. The rest I can try to figure out down the road hopefully. (I suspect #6 might have to do with #1.)

In dealing with #1, could I email you the url of my site so you can see the events calendar for yourself? I will disable the coming soon plugin. Or if you need access to the back end, let me know how to “let you in.”

[Rob]

Hi Cindy. Sure! Why not email me the details (along with backend access, if you can) and I can try and figure this one out? Maybe if we’re lucky I can knock a few off the list 🙂 My email is rob at tri.be.

[Cindy]

I greatly appreciate the time, effort and help you are giving. I imagine we newbs are quite frustrating, but I’m working hard at trying to figure this all out! 🙂

I will create a user account for you, but at what level do you need it to be? Do you need full administrator access or something less? Let me know and I will set that up for you and email you the info.

Thanks!! 🙂

[Rob]

Hi Cindy. Always happy to help. If you could get me admin credentials, it’d be great – you can of course delete those when we are finished testing but I’d like to make sure we’re covering/checking everything we can to try and get this resolved.

[Cindy]

Partial good news! I’ve discovered why the calendar was using my first event as the calendar title. I was using the Default Page Template. If I switch to Default Events Template the calendar is titled Calendar of Events.

This brings up another problem, however. This page is full width, which gets me into problem #2 as originally stated. I have a vertical line that would normally separate the sidebar from the main content. I’d love to have my calendar full width if the detail page could have the sidebar, but it seems I’m destined to have one problem or the other.

I tried to find this in the FAQ as suggested, but was unable to locate the info. If someone has an easy step by step solution to this, I’m all ears (or eyes as the case may be). 🙂

[Rob]

Hi Cindy. Great to hear that solution fixed your problem with the header; weird that I was unable to recreate that, but it looks like we’re set here so that’s what I’ll direct other users who have the same problem to do as well.

You’re saying you just want to have the calendar view itself not show sidebars, but the individual listing keep showing them?

[Cindy]

Yes, exactly.

[Rob]

Thanks for confirming. Let me look into this, will be back in touch as soon as I’ve got a substantive response.

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