Using the calendar on a college site

[Bill]

Hi,
I’m interested in using The Events Calendar Pro on a college site and I have a few questions I hope you can answer.

1) is there a way to set certain fields as required when creating events? (also is there a way to do this when using the Community Events add on)

2) Most of our events are on campus which has one street address. When setting up venues, is there a way to use GPS coordinates instead of street address?

3) In a multisite set up, if we have the calendar running on one sub site, what’s the best way to display (only) the events on another sub site? There are plugins out there that accept, parse, and display ical feeds so I think this is one option. Are there other options?

4) email subscriptions. If we wanted to offer email subscriptions to the whole calendar, just a category, or just a particular event, what would you recommend?

I realize some of these may be wish list items. So, if you have a sense of where the product is going and how future versions might help, please let me know. In fact, do you have a product roadmap that you can share? 🙂

thanks.

[Rob]

Hey Bill. Thanks for reaching out here, and for your interest in the plugin. Happy to answer these questions best I can:

1. At this point, it’s unfortunately not doable without hacking the core plugin (which we don’t recommend). We have had a few requests for this option and I can personally see the value in it myself; it’s logged as a proposed feature for a future build and if it comes it’d likely be sometime during the 2.1 lifecycle. (More on that below).
2. Another one that we’ve had a few requests for and have logged on the broader roadmap, but sadly have no support for at this point.
3. Given how this plugin is set up, the multisite integration doesn’t allow for just one calendar to display information to all calendars within that network out of the box. Since the plugin does come with an iCal feed, that may be the best route – either that or a third-party plugin.
4. Good question. This hasn’t really come up much before, but I know we have had a few users tying their events into MailChimp (which may be a bit heavy-handed for your needs…). The Community add-on allows for notifications to be sent to the site admin when a new submission comes through, and we’re probably going to be building that out a bit further over the next few months, but don’t have any immediate plans for email notifications in Events unless we see a significant demand for it from the community.

We certainly do have a somewhat extensive plan for this plugin down the road (continuing with our monthly maintenance dot-releases, then doing a broader push every few months – 2.1 will be our next of those)…but not much that we’ve got available to share. Yet. The 2.1 roadmap is fairly close to being finalized and we’re on track to have that out sometime in the fall; once we do have a defined roadmap I’m going to post it for public consumption over at the main Events Calendar PRO forum.

Hope this helps. If you have other questions or if I can elaborate on any of those above, do let me know. Cheers!

[Bill]

Thanks. Are there any hooks that we might use to augment the Google map functions? (it doesn’t sound like it)

[Bill]

Also, is there a way to import events from an existing iCal file, or even a CSV or tab-delimited text file? [I seem to remember reading about this, but I can not find it] thanks.

[Rob]

Hey Bill. Thanks for the follow-ups; apologies that it took me a few days to get you a responses here. In terms of hooks and filters, pretty much everything we’ve got can be found at https://theeventscalendar.com/support/documentation.

While we don’t have an iCal-specific method for importing, your memory serves you correctly: there is a CSV-based importer being beta tested that I’d be happy to let you play around with if you wanted (though note, it does require PRO to run). If you’re game shoot me an email (pro a/ tri.be) and we’ll hook it up.

Likewise, let me know if you have any other questions that I can answer.

[wdgdc]

You can allow blogid to be defined in the query string with the following code:

// Allow blogid to be set in query
function blogid_query_set_blog_id( $query ) {
global $blog_id;

if ( isset($query->query_vars[‘blogid’]) && $query->query_vars[‘blogid’] != $blog_id ){
switch_to_blog( $query->query_vars[‘blogid’] );
} else {
$query->query_vars[‘blogid’] = NULL;
}
}
add_action( ‘pre_get_posts’, ‘blogid_query_set_blog_id’ );
add_action( ‘loop_start’, ‘blogid_query_set_blog_id’ );

function blogid_query_restore_blog_id( $query ) {
if ( isset($query->query_vars[‘blogid’]) ) {
restore_current_blog();
}
}
add_action( ‘loop_end’, ‘blogid_query_restore_blog_id’ );

function blogid_query_posts_results( $posts, $query ) {
if ( isset($query->query_vars[‘blogid’]) ) {
restore_current_blog();
}
return $posts;
}
add_filter( ‘posts_results’, ‘blogid_query_posts_results’, 10, 2 );

From there you just have to customize the widgets to specify which site’s calendar you would like to use.

[Rob]

Thanks, Mike!

Bill, this of any use to you? Still got any questions after reviewing Mike’s note + mine above it? Let us know and we’ll follow-up on our end as needed. Cheers!

[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]

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