The Events Calendar

The Events Calendar is perfect for a better organization of the events from your life. With the help of the paid add-ons, you can have access to lots of new features and possibilities: import Facebook events, frontend user event submission, recurring events, saved venues and organizers, venue view, Eventrite and WooCommerce integration and even more to discover.

The Events Calendar provides to WordPress users an elegant way to manage the events from your life. The plugin can be found for free on WordPress Plugins Repository and it benefits of some nice add-ons meant to improve its functionality.

Installation and Settings

The plugin can be installed just like another WordPress Plugin, from Plugins->Add New and after activation, a new Events Menu will appear in the left side of your Dashboard.

The Menu contains the following options:

• Events – a list of the added events
• Add New – here you can create a new event by filling the fields
• Event Categories – new categories of events
• Settings – make General Settings and Template settings – after adding new add-ons , you’ll have to make more settings
• Help – here you will find information about resources, forums and contact
• Event Add-Ons – here you will see the available add-ons for The Events Calendar

Settings

The settings that are presented here, are the usual settings, before installing any add-on.

General

As the name says it, here you can make general settings like: the Default View for the Events, Events URL slug and Single Event URL slug – necessary for showing in the frontend, Numbers of events to show per page, choose if you would like to Show Comments or not, set the Multiday Event Cutoff, choose if you would like to Enable Google Maps and make the settings for weight, height and zoom level.
Also, you can Send Press Trends Data and you can enable Debug Mode.

Template

The Events Calendar allows you to choose your Events Calendar Template and you can customize it by adding HTML and CSS before and after the Calendar.

Creating a new Event

In order to create a new event, choose Add New and fill the event’s name, content and start filling The Events Calendar area with information about:

• Event Time and Date: add here the start and end date/time and choose if the evnt is an all day one
• Event Location Details: for each event that you add you must add the location where it will take place – add venue name, address, city, country, state or province, postal code and choose if you would like to add Google Maps link
• Event Organizer Details: add organizer name, phone, website and email
• Event Cost – if the attendants have to pay for the event, here you can add the cost

For each event that you add you can select the Category (added like any other category in Event Categories option from the menu), you can Hide from Upcoming Events List and you can set a Featured Image. More than that, you can download calendars for iCal import.

Making the events to show up in a page

As I’ve said before, the Events URL slug and Single Event URL slug are the ones that make The Events Calendar visible on your site.
How to do that?
Easy: after creating a new page , modify it’s permalink by adding the slug that you have set in General Settings – by default: “/events/”.

Also, you can make events to show up in posts and in your menu.

Widget

The Events Calendar has a widget called Next Event Widget, which shows the next event.

How it looks

List of Upcoming Events

Calendar of Events

A Detailed Event

Add-Ons

The Events Calendar has 5 paid Add-Ons and more on the oven.
The available add-ons are:

• Events Calendar PRO – which is available in 3 License packages: Personal – at $50, Business – $100 and Developer $250
• Eventbrite Tickets – Personal License – at $50, Business License – $100 and Developer License – $250
• Community Events – this has the same price plan as Events Calendar PRO and Eventbrite Tickets
• Facebook Events – which come in a different pricing plan: Personal License – at $20, Business License – $35 and Developer License – $60
• WooTickets – which is also available in a Personal License – at $50, Business License – $100 and Developer License – $250

Your can verify your licenses in the Licenses Tab from Settings.

Events Calendar PRO

This Add-On comes with new features, improving the functionality of the plugin. You can add recurrence to your events (Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Yearly or Custom), you will be able to set Additional Fields for your events (text boxes, check boxes, radio buttons or drop-down list) and also, the Venues and Organizers are saved in a drop-down list, so if they repeat, you can quickly choose them.

The Additional Fields

Adding New Venue

Edit Organizer

Another improvement is the widget. The PRO add-on brings two widgets: a Calendar Widget and an advanced and more detailed widget, which shows the upcoming events, with the info that you set.

Setting the Defaults

Adding Additional Fields with Events Calendar PRO

Community Events

This Add-On enables frontend submission for registered users and also for anonymous users. You can access the community events by creating a new page with the permalink “/events/community/add” – for adding a new event or “/events/community/list” – for listing your events. So what if your permalinks are turned off?
Then you can make use of shortcodes! How? Just create a new page and add the following shortcodes:

• [tribe_community_events_title] – as title
• [tribe_community_events] – in content

Remember that the shortcodes work only on pages!

Adding Community Event

My Events Page

Facebook Events

The Events Calendar was thought for your need of staying in touch with your friends via Facebook and it allows you to import Facebook events from Facebook Page or Organization.
After installing the Add-On, a new Facebook tab will appear in Settings.

Here you can make different settings like Organization and Page Usernames/IDs, Auto Import, Importing Frequency and optional fields for Facebook App ID and Facebook App Secret.

Eventbrites Tickets

The Events Calendar offers third party integration with Eventbrites for selling tickets. When you add a new event, you can add an event cost and register it as an Eventbrite event. Once you do that, you will have to fill a new area with the ticket’s info.

For each event that has ticket, you must fill the ticket’s name, description, dates for start and end ticket sale, type – and here you can choose: set price, donation based or free, cost and quantity and you can choose if you would like to include fee in price.

The Accepted Payment Methods for online payment are: PayPal and Google Checkout and for Offline payment, you can accept checks, cash and invoice.

Also, you can import Eventbrite events.

Woo Tickets

Woo Tickets Add-On allows you to sell tickets for your events, directly from your posts/events page. You can sell as many tickets as you want or you can give them for free. It’s all your choice.

After you install the Add-On, for each event you will have a new section with the possibility to add ticket(s).

The full integration with the well-known e-commerce plugin WooCommerce makes the sells even easier. You must give the ticket a name, a description, a price, set the available number of tickets, and an identifier for each ticket type that you are selling.

Each ticket can be edited, deleted or edited in WooCommerce. Also, you can see the reports of selling and the attendees.

This is how the ticket is edited in WooCommerce:

As you can see, WooTickets and WooCommerce offers so many options to set for your tickets, like: General – regular price, sale price, weight or dimension, Taxes, Inventory, Shipping, Related Products, Attributes and more Advanced options – like purchase note, menu order, grouping.

This is how an event page with a ticket attached looks like:

You can place the purchase form wherever you want by customizing your template.

Support

For The Events Calendar, you have multiple ways to benefit of support: on the WordPress Support Forum and also on the author’s site you can check the Documentation and the FAQs, find lots of tutorials, check out the forums and also watch some helpful videos.

Conclusions

• The Events Calendar is a great organizer for your events, its functionality being improved by the add-ons available for it – each of them doing it’s job best.
• The plugin has a very intuitive interface, making the things even easier for users.
• The WooCommerce integration brings new features and makes users to enjoy selling within WordPress trough a very powerful e-commerce plugin.
• The recurring events, the possibility to set default venues and organizers is a really time-saver.