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Related events listed at the bottom of an event page occur too far in the future and include other venues.
On a reoccurring event page, September 15, 2015 , 6:00 pm – 7:15 pm, the related events include events next year and 2 years from now from different venues?
This is strange, as the user preference would be to see related events prioritized by the same venue, on the same day or after the event the user is currently viewing or alternate venues on or near the same day of the event the user is currently viewing.
What was shown to the user in related events were 3 different locations, both recurring and non-recurring events, occurring on future dates way too far in the future, i.e.,
April 14, 2017 , 9:15 am – 10:15 am
September 20, 2015 , 9:00 am – 10:15 am
January 13, 2016 , 1:15 pm – 2:15 pmI appreciate your help.
My customer feedback is that your customers have to do a lot of testing for your company on simple use cases that I would hope have been tested by your company or a 3rd party testing team.
I understand the testing path of turning off all plugins and defaulting to the Twenty Fourteen theme to rule out possible errors, but I would also like to hear that your company is actively testing your products with the most popular themes, i.e. Avada, X or ENFOLD; as well as standard, very popular plugins, i.e. Jetpack, Yoast SEO, Spam Bee, Woo Commerce, etc.
Howdy Jennifer,
Thanks for reaching out and taking the time to share your feedback. I want to first address your concern that we don’t test enough. I appreciate your candor and will definitely keep that in mind. I do want to mention that we do third party usability tests, in addition to employing UX experts and strategists. We definitely strive to build user friendly products.
It seems like the crux of your issue might be a slight misunderstanding of how related events works. It displays upcoming events from the same category, not the same venue. Many of our users have venues which host a large variety of events, all unrelated. So for them it does not make sense at all to show all events from the same venue as “related”.
That said there are many unique use cases like yours. And so we do our best to make our calendar extremely easy to customize so that each use case can be addressed. You evidently want to change the related posts query to show upcoming events from the same venue, instead of upcoming events from the same category. Perhaps you also wish to limit the query to events within a certain timeframe, say within a month of the current event. That is completely possible and couldn’t be easier if you are a WP customizer. A standard WP Query powers the related events, and we run the query args through the filter ‘tribe_related_posts_args’. The function which applies that filter can be found here: /events-calendar-pro/src/functions/template-tags/general.php:668 So you could simple strip the category/taxonomy, and alter the query to do a post meta check for events which share the same venue, and whose start date is within your desired timeframe.
Does that all make sense? Do you have any more feedback? Please let us know.
Cheers!
– Brook
Brook,
Thank you for getting back to us. Sorry if we confused the issue for you. I think you misunderstood our primary request.
If your related events default to upcoming events from within the same category, that is fantastic and expected behavior! We knew that.
Showing related events from the same venue was a nice to have, not a must have.
Our primary concern is that, by default and out of the box, the time distance between the current event and the queried related events, from within the same category, is unique and way too far apart.
Since a calendar is based on time, and the usability of a calendar is to see events related by time, showing related events that skip years is quite unique and not all that helpful. This is particularly unique as the related events query skips years worth of relevant related events. I myself don’t plan my schedule that far in advance.
The main goal is to show related events that are close to an event’s date and time.
Do you have plans in the future to add simple related event queries to your UI? I am not a fan of customizing plugins and having to manually manage custom hacks/edits when updates occur.
For now, we will add the query.
Please let us know if you can add a few simple queries to the UI for related events.
Best,
I appreciate the clarification!
I can definitely understand the desire to now want to write modifications to WordPress plugins. I try to limit the amount I make on my sites to the bare minimum. The fewer the easier it is to maintain.
We often deliberate whether to add UIs for customizing _____ minor feature of the plugin. And one thing that has weight in these discussions is the question “is this bloat?” Everybody loves more features in a plugin, yet everyone hates a bloated plugin. It’s a paradox all plugins must walk a line between. To be up front, we have almost never seen requests to make Related Posts have more settings. The extreme majority of people are happy with how it works out of the box. But if that ever changes, we would certainly be interested in making it a setting.
When we can’t make something a setting in the backend due to bloat concerns, we do try to make it incredibly easy to customize. This snippet for instance can be put in your theme’s functions.php file and it will limit related posts to only showing events within two months of the event’s date.
https://gist.github.com/elimn/1e6797dd1a5d8ee666c5
Does that all make sense? Would that snippet work for you?
Cheers!
– Brook
Excellent! I am happy to hear it. Thanks for your understanding.
Please let us know if you need anything else in the future. We are doing a big 4.0 release in the near future, which is liable to break some existing customizations. But, along side that we are doing a backwards compatible 3.13 for folks with customization which do break, so they can stay on 3.13 for a few months while updating their customizations. That said, I do not anticipate this particular customization will break with 4.0. I just wanted to give you some fair warning of upcoming changes just in case it was relevant.
Since this is now resolved I am going to archive this topic. Always feel free to open a new one should you have any future questions or issues. Cheers!
– Brook
Hi There!
Just wanted to share with you that a new release of our plugins is out, including an improvement for the related events. Now, related events are ordered by the start date so they are displayed when they’re close to the date of the event that is actually being viewed
Find out more about this release → https://theeventscalendar.com/maintenance-release-for-the-week-of-27-may-2018/
Don’t hesitate to open a new topic if anything comes up.
Best,
Victor
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