Some pre-sale questions.

[Camile Gauthier]

Good Morning Events Calendar folks,

I am very much looking into purchasing your suite of tools for my site, and was wondering if you could help seal the deal by answering some questions.

First a little bit of context. Our site is a city-wide event listing service type of thing. We highlight the events, the venues and the organizers (however under different titles). Each of our listing (event, venue and organizer) have/will have a video associated to it. While we are city-wide we are aimed at a very specific niche… with it’s own sub-niches. Being able to find events that are specific to an individual’s tastes is important.

Also, our developer was attempting to modify a pre-existing plugin (Chronosly) to meet our needs, but it turns out they have written the most complicated and messy source in the world. So we’re back to square one.

Ok, so here are our questions:

1- We have specific needs for our front-page, other event plugins/services do not permit us to achieve these needs. Here’s the wireframe for our proposed site: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/15710764/gktrpls-site_layout.png

What’s important here, is that we can display the events in a netflix-esque tiling, but also to do the same with Venues and Organizers.

2- Events, we have a whole pile of other data that we add for each of our events, venues and organizers. like a detailed list of all their social media links, and some very specific classification choices. Can we add these extra pieces of data to our listings? Can we also do so in a way where we don’t have to add them manually each time, but from groups of checkboxes?

Contet examples: For venues we require the following

• Further Social Media links (text boxes)
• A Neighborhood section (pulldown)
• Interests served (checkboxes)
• Accesibility and amenities (checkboxes)

3- A way to add “neighbourhoods” to the top calendar sort and the filter bar. Our hierarchal breakdown looks like this: Neighbourhood > Venue > Event. But if we plan for the future (we’re talking about a long-term relationship with you guys here) it will end up looking like: City > Neighbourhood > Venue > Event

Is any of that possible?

4- My developer keeps chanting “shortcodes”, do you have them? And can I see them so I can send them to him?

5- Do you have any intentions on having Facebook and Twitter posting features within the app? This would save us some effort.

6- How customizable is the Photo View? We would love to have more control of it, but we’re not sure if that is possible,

7- Bonus points: we were hoping that any click on the calendars (we’re most attracted to the Photo View), open a modal/lightbox that auto plays our YouTube video and then gives the option to go to the individual event/venue/organizer page right bellow… is there anything in your plugin that would stop us from doing that?

That’s about it. We’re eagerly awaiting your reply.

• This topic was modified 9 years, 1 month ago by George.
• This topic was modified 9 years ago by George.

[George]

Hey Camile,

Thanks for reaching out to us here. I’ll address your questions in order to keep things organized – one thing to point out, however, is that getting the look or functionality of the calendar to match your exact desires may still require customizations, including custom CSS for styling and custom PHP snippets to alter the display or functionality of parts of the plugin. We don’t support such customizations, so I just wanted to point this out to not get your hopes up about what to expect from support here! 🙂 Now, on to your main questions:

1- We have specific needs for our front-page, other event plugins/services do not permit us to achieve these needs. Here’s the wireframe for our proposed site: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/15710764/gktrpls-site_layout.png

What’s important here, is that we can display the events in a netflix-esque tiling, but also to do the same with Venues and Organizers.

This is an example of customizations to the plugin you’d have to build yourself. Yes, the layout and Netflix-esque slider here are definitely technically possible, but they’re not a default view of the plugin or any premium add-on. Your best bet would be to create a custom page template for your theme, in my opinion, and style things as needed.

2- Events, we have a whole pile of other data that we add for each of our events, venues and organizers. like a detailed list of all their social media links, and some very specific classification choices. Can we add these extra pieces of data to our listings? Can we also do so in a way where we don’t have to add them manually each time, but from groups of checkboxes?

Extra details can indeed be added for all of the content types you mention here. For events, this is quite easy if you have the Events Calendar PRO add-on – there’s a whole section in the Events settings page called “Additional Fields”, which allows you to create additional meta fields for the Events type. Read more about this here → https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/pro-additional-fields/

As for adding custom data to venues and organizers, this would require a bit more code involvement, but is again indeed technically possible. You can manually code up some meta fields and the form inputs on various admin pages for the features you need, then simply get the meta and display it in events templates by customizing the events templates as described in our official Themer’s Guide, which you should read by clicking here

3- A way to add “neighbourhoods” to the top calendar sort and the filter bar. Our hierarchal breakdown looks like this: Neighbourhood > Venue > Event. But if we plan for the future (we’re talking about a long-term relationship with you guys here) it will end up looking like: City > Neighbourhood > Venue > Event

Not to sound like a broken record here, but yes, this is indeed technically possible, though not something we can offer much support or specific code/advice for here on the forums. If you have neighbourhoods easily accessible based on Venue meta that you add as described in the question above, you can indeed create a custom view and run some basic event/venue filtering based on this meta. For an example of how to build a custom view, I’d recommend checking out our example “Agenda View” plugin here → https://github.com/moderntribe/tribe-events-agenda-view. Some of the code is admittedly a bit outdated, but in general it might offer some inspiration and be a great place to start the learning process here. Another awesome resource would be to simply through the source code of the The Events Calendar itself and see how the default views are created, and how their filtering is processed.

4- My developer keeps chanting “shortcodes”, do you have them? And can I see them so I can send them to him?

At this time there are no shortcodes built into The Events Calendar core, PRO, or any other official add-ons. However, one of our developers Barry has made a plugin called Event Rocket, which is not officially supported, but is very well-made and includes several custom events-related shortcodes – and it’s free! 🙂 https://wordpress.org/plugins/event-rocket/

5- Do you have any intentions on having Facebook and Twitter posting features within the app? This would save us some effort.

At this time, no, these things are not planned features. There’s a myriad amount of other plugins for WordPress, free and premium and good and bad and simple and complex and everything in between, that enable this sort of functionality, so hopefully you can find a simple solution that works well for you.

6- How customizable is the Photo View? We would love to have more control of it, but we’re not sure if that is possible,

The Photo View, and in fact all views, are extremely customizable. For a better sense of exactly how flexible these views are, definitely give our Themer’s Guide a good solid read → https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/themers-guide/

7- Bonus points: we were hoping that any click on the calendars (we’re most attracted to the Photo View), open a modal/lightbox that auto plays our YouTube video and then gives the option to go to the individual event/venue/organizer page right bellow… is there anything in your plugin that would stop us from doing that?

No, there is nothing within the plugin itself that would prevent this sort of functionality from working, but that of course depends on your exact implementation of things. For example, say you hire a developer to build this for you and they do a bad job of writing the code to enable this sort of functionality, integrate things with a poor lightbox library, or something else undesirable – then regardless of our plugin, things would be quite ugly here and probably not work correctly. So yes, our plugin is well made and the markup is valid on Photo Views, which you can customize extensively anyways, but from there the success of a lightbox integration is all up to how exactly you write the code to do it.

I hope I addressed everything here, let us know if you have any other questions or concerns and let us know what you think about the replies given here. I’m happy to clarify anything if I left it too obtuse here in my original reply.

Cheers!
George

[Camile Gauthier]

Thank you for your reply. It looks like we will be joining your family in the next few hours.

One last question though, and it has to do with licensing, at the moment we require your plugin only on one site, however, my developer will working with it on a staging subdomin… does this break any license agreement?

[George]

Hey Camile,

Awesome, glad my reply helped. As for licensing, it’s not a problem at all to have a version on your staging subdomain and a version on the “live” site itself as well.

Cheers!
George

[Support Droid]

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