Using The Events Calendar plugin with the Customizr theme
You have a niche blog set up with the Customizr WordPress theme and you want to display events in your area/city/region/country in your niche. Or you have your organization site built with the Customizr and you want to display events organized by you. Most importantly, you want to be able to list the events month-wise, day-wise and then you want them to be searchable.
Now, that is not a lot to ask for. So, what would you do when faced with this need?
Simply install The Events Calendar plugin.
The Events Calendar plugin
The Events Calendar plugin is a powerful event management system for your WordPress site. It is rich in features, yet extremely easy to setup and use. It has a friendly user interface that makes managing events a breeze. This makes it extremely popular on WordPress with more than 300 K active installs and hundreds of top ratings.
You can easily add your events, manage venues and organizers. You can also display Google Maps for the venues. The plugin’s settings page gives a lot of customization options that lets you manage your events and calendar according to your needs.
Installation
Installation is the same procedure as for any other plugin.
Login into your WordPress site as admin, go to Plugins > Add New. Enter "The Events Calendar" in the Search box provided. From the results, click on "Install Now" next to the plugin.
Be aware that there are other plugins with almost the same name. So, ensure that you install the plugin by Modern Tribe.
After installation, activate the plugin.
Basic setup
The plugin is works out-of-the-box without any setup. Settings can be changed by clicking on Events > Settings from the admin dashboard.
In the General settings, you can set up details like number of events to list per page, the events listing slug and the single event slug.
The second tab in Settings is the Display Settings. Under this, you can choose a style from among three styles provided. The template to be used, the default views and additional html, if needed can be provided here.
Creating and Managing events
Creating events is simple. Click on Events > Events from the admin dashboard. Initially, when there are no events you will see an empty events listing. Click on Add New to add a new event.
The Event editor appears on screen. This is similar to a post editor with a few events-specific metaboxes thrown in.
Enter a title and description to your event. You can also edit the Permalink if you want.
Add one or more Event Categories for the event in the Event Categories metabox. You could also specify hierarchical Categorization by giving a Parent Category.
On to the specifics!
In the metabox below the editor, Provide the Time and Date. The start and end date and time can be specified. You can also specify if it is an all day event.
Next comes the venue. You can create a new venue the first time. Once a venue has been created, it can be used for another event by choosing it from the dropdown list against Use Saved Venue. Along with the Name and Postal Address details, you can also choose to show Google Maps by checking against it.
After the venue come the organisers. Add one or more organisers by specifying the Organiser Name, Telephone, Website and Email.
Complete the details by entering an event website, if you have one. Lastly but certainly, a very important detail is the cost of the event. Specify the currency and the cost or enter 0 for a free event.
Click on Publish to create the event.
Your first event is created. Take a look at the events listing at Events > Events from the admin dashboard.
You can create further events in a similar fashion as shown below.
Viewing the events
The events so created can be viewed from the default url http://yoursiteurl/events/ which is the default url for the events listing. You will find the events listed for the current month. You have options to search for an event by keyword or date. You can also view as month, list or by date.
The default Default View is Month-wise listing.
You can also view the upcoming events as a list.
The last option is to view the events on a particular day.
Click on any of the event links in any of the views to see the complete event details with the Google maps et al.
The reader can add the event to his/her Google Calendar or iCal too. Isn't that awesome?
The events calendar is a simple, yet feature-rich plugin that adds extremely useful features to your site. Why don't you go ahead and create that events page on your site?
External Resources
Doc created by: Menaka S.