Setting up long running events spanning month boundary

[Jan Hnatek]

Dear Modern Tribe,

I’d like to ask for some guidance. We’d like to create an event for an exhibition:
It should run from 2017-08-16 to 2017-10-01. On weekdays it’s open 9:00-17:00,
on Monday closed and on weekends it’s 13:00-17:00.
Here’s what we tried:

1. Setting start date = 2017-08-16 9:00 and end date = 2017-10-01 17:00.
This is probably not the right way (it doesn’t reflect every day’s opening hours,
Mondays etc.).
Still, there’s a problem – the event doesn’t display for September at all!
Looking back on August it’s there for every day, but not for the remaining months.
This looks like a bug.

2. Using recurring events:
Setting start date = 2017-08-16 9:00 and end date = 2017-08-16 17:00. Weekly
recurrence with special entries for weekdays and weekends.

This results in copying the event into per-day individual events in the administration,
and it has some weird consequences for the public site too. For instance Related Events
show the same recurring event, just on different days, which doesn’t make any sense.
Basically it doesn’t look like one event running on multiple days, but many events differing
only by date.

It seems that using recurring events for an exhibition is not the right thing to do after all.

Can you suggest the right approach please?

[Jan Hnatek]

This reply is private.

[Andras]

Čau Jan,

Thanks for reaching out to us! What a great question. Let me try to help you with this one.

What you what to achieve is doable but likely not in a way you imagine.

I just tested your first option, I set up an event from Sept. 25 to Nov. 5 and in month view it showed up for all 3 months. In the list view it doesn’t show up so I’m going to log that as a bug.

Anyway that would be one way to do it.

An alternative would be setting up one long all-day event (from Aug 16 to Oct 1.) and specify the opening hours for every weekday in the description. Probably this is the most straightforward way to do it. (In my reading it is an exhibition running from Aug 16 to Oct 1)

A workaround for it now showing up in the middle month: set up a long event for every month it’s happening in. Aug 16-31, Sept 1-30, Oct 1.

Alternative is setting up a recurring event as you said above with multiple recurrence rules. Set up the event for the start date; then one weekly rule for Tuesday-Friday; one weekly rule for Saturday-Sunday as most probably you did it.

I can check for you if anything can be done with the related events in this case. As for hiding the recurrences on the back-end, I will check as well. If I remember correctly we have a snippet somewhere that can do this for you, so you will only see the first instance of a recurring event series in the back-end.

Does this help?

Cheers,
Andras

[Andras]

Found this article in our knowledgebase that should hide the recurring instances on the backend.

https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/hide-recurring-event-instances-in-admin/

Let me know if that works.

Cheers,
Andras

[Jan Hnatek]

Hi András,

thanks for the informative reply and filing the bug!

The snippet for hiding the recurring event copies on the backend works for me.
But that’s just a nuisance and the real issue is on the frontend. Wouldn’t you
have a similar functionality for the frontend, please?

Cheers,
Jan

[Andras]

Hi Jan,

Happy to hear that helped.

For the front-end we have a setting under Events > Settings > General tab (screenshot).

That will not show the recurrences on list view based pages, but likely does not influence the “Related events” part.

I will check this latter with the team, if there is something to be done about it. I’ll get back to you on that as soon as I have something.

Cheers,
Andras

[Andras]

Hi Jan,

I checked your site again, specifically that page with the recurring event. I refreshed it a couple of times and it gave me different recommended /related events each time. Sometimes of course it gave me the same event as I was looking at, but a different date.

I believe that is working properly.

You might find some plugins which help you customize what related posts / events are chosen. I ran a google search on the phrase “how are related posts chosen” and saw some options there. Maybe that could help.

Let me know if there’s anything else I can help you with.

Cheers,
Andras

[Jan Hnatek]

Hi András,

I used the setting you pointed me to and hidden the recurrences from the list views.
It seems that I’m no longer getting the recurring events in the related events either.

Thanks for the help!

Can I have one more question, please?

In the month view when there are multiple events that don’t fit the area (e.g. Sep 13 on
my site) it displays the ‘See all events’ link, effectively hiding some events that “overflow”.
What’s the ordering/priority for these?
It would be great if it would prioritize to show the one-off events over the recurring ones
(e.g. Sep 26), but it doesn’t seem to be the case (Sep 13).

Regards,
Jan

[Andras]

Happy to hear it helped! Awesome!

More questions? Sure, let them come. 🙂

I believe the events there are sorted based on their start time in the day. If there is a recurring event, than that might precede that.

If they all start at the same time then I believe it’s alphabetical.

Out of the box there is no way to influence the order. If you want to have an option an all the event pages so you can set up the order one-by-one, then you would need to develop that functionality. I’m not quite sure how easy or difficult that would be though.

Andras

[Jan Hnatek]

Ok, thanks.

[Barry]

Glad you’re all sorted here, Jan.

I’ll go ahead and close the topic since you marked it as ‘resolved’ but of course please don’t hesitate to create new topics if we can help with anything else 🙂

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