sidebar calendar widget and recurring events…

[Chris Dawson]

hi there, i have a site using the PRO sidebar calendar widget that also shows ‘featured’ (< a category) events in a carousel, and we’re going round in circle with a couple of things in terms of how we specify events that span multiple days.

we can’t figure out a satisfactory way to use ‘recurring’ events if an event starts on a particular day and happens everyday until a particular date. if we set it as “recurring” everyday we end up with our ‘featured’ carousel full of ‘replicates’, but if we set it as a single event spanning multiple days then our event doesn’t appear appropriately in the sidebar mini-list under the widget calendar (by default it will show “11 November 4pm – 24 December 6pm” which comes from tribe_events_event_schedule_details(); in the single-event template, which isn’t really what we want (better would be “11 November-24 December 4-6pm” but i can’t find a way to do this).

what is the logic behind which events appear under the widget mini-calendar? in terms of priorities and ordering? particularly when clicking on specific days in the widget calendar…

looking at https://theeventscalendar.com/function-category/events/ i’ve tried editing the single-event template to use alternatives like tribe_get_start_date(); but this also echoes the TIME (argh)…

any suggestions/clarifications here please?
thanks,

[Chris Dawson]

in terms of the mini-list ordering/prioritisation under the widget calendar, it would be ideal to prioritise (put at the top) events that START on the specific day clicked on, followed by recurring events that are “in the middle of a run” as it were. is there any way to do that conditionally?
(this might sound ‘edge-case’ but i think it’s quite fundamental to user-focused design and useability if you are trying to manage LOTS of events)

[Cliff]

Hi Chris. I can understand.

To be clear, I think when you said “recurring” you meant “a single event that spans multiple days,” not a single event the recurs/repeats in an interval, right?

If yes, you may be interested in adding your vote to this other feature request: https://tribe.uservoice.com/forums/195723-feature-ideas/suggestions/5318027-month-view-have-multi-day-events-span-the-cons

I’d suggest you also add your own idea from here to our UserVoice page.

Please let me know if you have any follow-up questions on this topic.

[Chris Dawson]

thanks, have added my vote. that’s one part of it i think.

we are basically trying to find the best way to specify events that occur every day over a set number of days. they should in an ideal world be specified as ‘recurring’ events, as each ‘day’ is discrete e.g. you can go ice-skating any day during december, it’s not a single event spanning several days. BUT if we do this we end up with loads of events in the back-end UI and our category slider then contains loads of ‘replicates’. key thing is how these type of events appear in the widget calendar list and category sliders.

i agree it’s a tricky one to get heads around, but at the moment i don’t have a solution for my client.

at the moment i think we need to stick with using “single event spanning multiple days” to avoid replication in our “featured events” slider which is a more significant problem. and if we do that then we need to have some way to customise the widget mini-list under the sidebar calendar to avoid our currently confusing: “11 November 4pm – 24 December 6pm”. any thoughts/suggestions on how to customise this? i’m looking at https://theeventscalendar.com/function-category/events/ and i’ve tried editing the single-event template to use alternatives to tribe_events_event_schedule_details(); like tribe_get_start_date(); but this frustrating echoes the TIME as well… (ideally the calendar mini-list dates shown should (dynamically) relate to the DAY clicked on rather than the entire span of the event. this demonstrates the complexity of the problem!)
as i say, going round in circles…

[Cliff]

You may benefit from this snippet if you do go with daily recurring events and don’t want wp-admin cluttered with them:

https://gist.github.com/cliffordp/81f23a207ab483c9e7c6d910f9b29c0a

If I correctly understood what you’re wanting, you might want to use the tribe_get_recurrence_text function, which is from this file: /wp-content/plugins/events-calendar-pro/src/functions/template-tags/general.php

It’s the function that outputs this text: https://cl.ly/2l0v3H0b1v2w

[Support Droid]

Hey there! This thread has been pretty quiet for the last three weeks, so we’re going to go ahead and close it to avoid confusion with other topics. If you’re still looking for help with this, please do open a new thread, reference this one and we’d be more than happy to continue the conversation over there.

Thanks so much!
The Events Calendar Support Team

[Author]

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