Next Event Widget – no longer showing full event details.

[Derek]

As per the title, since updating to 2.09 the Next Event Widget no longer shows the full text and images of the event. Rather, it now displays only about the first 7 lines, then a “[…]” to suggest the text continues.
I can’t see an option to revert back to showing the full details, which is how I prefer it – it looks pretty ugly cutting the description of an event off half way through. Also, the […] does not perform as a link anyway, so the user still has to click the Event title to read the full description (this does improve when I revert to twenty eleven theme to a “continue reading” link).

Is this intended, or a bug? Is there an option to revert that I’m missing in the settings somewhere? Thanks in advance.

[Jonah]

Hi Derek,

The Next Events Widget by default never displayed an image. It sounds like you must have customized the widget display but did not make your customizations in the right place. The file to make changes is in /wp-content/plugins/events-calendar-pro/views/widget-featured-display.php and if you make changes, you need to make a copy of that file and place in an ‘events’ folder in your active theme.

Did you make a backup of your files before you updated? You should always do this so you can revert back. Unfortunately there is no switch available in our plugin to be able to revert back. You’ll either need to dig around for a backup (maybe through your web host?) or modify the widget code again.

I hope that helps.

Regards,
– Jonah

[Derek]

Jonah, thanks for your reply.
Honestly, I hadn’t customised the Widget beyond the options available to me in Appearance>Widgets on the dashboard.
Are we talking about the same widget? I’m referring to the “Next Event Widget” (not the “Events List Advanced Widget”). It showed the images before, without customisation, it simply pulled through any image inserted in the body of the event text (not featured image), but of course I can’t show you an example of that now…!
It’s been that way since I went PRO, which I think was back in December last year.
I also appear to have lost all formatting in my next event widget – line breaks, font styling etc aren’t pulling through either, and the biggest concern is that before changing to 2.09 the widget showed the complete event description. What I’m getting now appears to be the first 55 words of the description, then it cuts off.

I have a weekly backup of the database thanks, so the events data itself is fine. This issue relates to how it’s displayed in the widget – regrettably it doesn’t look like you have the previous versions of Events Calendar and Pro available to download on the site, because I could have reverted back to 2.08 for the time being.

[Jonah]

Hi Derek,

Ok, I think I see what’s going on. We did change some code in the widget. I apologize for this. Try this, make a copy of /wp-content/plugins/events-calendar-pro/views/widget-featured-display.php and place in an ‘events’ folder in your theme. Then, find lines 67-69 that look like this:

$content = apply_filters('the_content', strip_shortcodes( $post->post_content ));
$content = str_replace(']]>', ']]>', $content);
echo wp_trim_words( $content, apply_filters( 'excerpt_length', 55 ), apply_filters('excerpt_more', ' ' . '[...]') );

…and change to:

the_content();

That will make it so the widget displays the full content including images.

Let me know how that looks.

Regards,
– Jonah

[Derek]

Not a problem Jonah – that fixes it thank you.

I was going to ask if this would change again in a future release, but I suppose as long as I have widget-featured-display.php in my theme directory it will take precedence over the version in the plugin directory anyway.

Thanks again for your replies.

[Jonah]

Hi Derek,

Glad to hear that worked! Yes, you are correct, that file and any other overridable template file will take precedence over the stock files.

Let me know if you need anything else!

– Jonah

[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.

[Author]

Posts