Welcome to the Community Events primer! If you’re ready to accept frontend event submissions on your site, you’ve come to the right place. Here’s what we’ll be reviewing in the primer you’re about to read:
- Installing & verifying your Community Events license key
- Reviewing the Community Events options on the Settings panel
- Finding the form & viewing your events list
- Template overrides in Community Events
Let’s go! What you’re about to read should leave you comfortable with the plugin’s functionality and ready to jump into it.
I. Installing & verifying your Community Events license key
We’re assuming that you’re already familiar with The Events Calendar, and that you have it installed on your site. (If you haven’t read our new user primer for the core plugin, now might be a good time to do so). We’re also assuming that you have already purchased the Community Events add-on, which you can do right here, and downloaded the plugin from Account Central –> Downloads to your desktop.
All set? As the screencast above shows, installing & activating Community Events is very basic:
- Log into the backend of your site and navigate to Plugins –> Add New from the sidebar admin menu.
- Elect to upload a new plugin (ZIP) folder.
- Following the instructions on the screen, select the still zipped up Community Events add-on. Hit the “Upload” button and wait for confirmation that the process is complete.
- When prompted, activate the plugin. You’ll notice that if you try to do so without The Events Calendar activated, you’ll get a warning message across the top of the page and will not be able to use the Community Events add-on until you’ve activated the core plugin accordingly.
- Head back to the tri.be website – where you first bought the plugin — and login with the credentials you set up during the checkout process.
- The license key can found under Account Central –> License Keys. Find your unused key for the Community Events add-on from the list.
- Copy the key, then return to the backend of your site.
- Navigate to Settings –> The Events Calendar, then hit the “Licenses” tab.
- In the appropriate field, paste in your key. Wait for it to validate and for the green expiration date to appear. If a red warning appears the key is not validated and will not be until the green expiration date shows. Make sure to save after the key finishes its verification process!
You’re all set now: the plugin is activated and the license key has been verified. So far, so good. Before we go into how you access your frontend submission form, let’s take a look at the new “Community” settings tab.
II. Reviewing the Community Events options on the Settings panel
As a site admin, you have a number of controls over how frontend event submission works on your site: who gets notifications of new submissions, whether submissions go live automatically, etc. Almost all of those can be found on the new “Community” settings tab, found at Settings –> The Events Calendar. Though covered in broader depth in the video above, those offerings include:
General
- Allow anonymous submissions: Allow anonymous (non-logged in) users to submit events on your site. With this feature disabled, only users with registered accounts may submit.
- Use visual editor for event descriptions: By default, a simple text box appears for the event description on the frontend form. Use this to enable a visual editor — but keep in mind that it does require WordPress 3.3 or higher.
- Default status for submitted events: Decide whether submissions automatically go to “Draft,” “Pending Review” or “Published.”
- Community rewrite slug: Change where the submission form lives on your site. Your community events slug is siteurl/events/community by default. Change the events slug under the “General” settings page for The Events Calendar, and change the community slug here. An example of your current slug appears beneath the field as a point of reference.
Alerts
- Send an email alert when a new event is submitted: Enable immediate email notifications alerting you and others you determine of a new submission.
- Email addresses to be notified: The email addresses that notifications will be sent to, one per line.
Members
- Allow users to edit their submissions: Logged in users can edit their submissions (regardless of whether those are draft or already published) on the frontend of the site. Note that this feature does not work for anonymous users.
- Allow users to remove their submissions: Enable this to let users remove their submissions at will. Note that you will not receive a notification of any kind when a submission has been removed, and that both draft and live events alike can be removed. This feature also will not work for anonymous users.
- Use trash vs. delete when removing: Unless this is enabled, any submission a user deletes is entirely deleted from the system (versus sent to the events “Trash”).
My Events
- Events per page: How many events display per page when a user views the list of their submitted events on the frontend.
- Date/time format: How the date and time formatting appears on the frontend “My Events” list. Feel free to reference the WordPress link provided for formatting guidance.
- Pagination range: How many pages to show on either side of the current page, when viewing the frontend list of a user’s submissions.
Access Control
- Block access to WordPress Admin: Enable this to block certain levels of user from accessing the backend.
- Roles to block: With the box in the first bullet checked, pick the role(s) you want to block from accessing /wp-admin.
- Redirect URL: Where users will be redirected if they attempt to access /wp-admin. Note that this should be a full URL — and that leaving it blank will automatically set the site homepage as the redirect URL.
PRO Options*
- Default venue for submitted events: Makes the venue fields already pre-populated for users visiting the event submission form. Users can override this and add a new venue as they see fit.
- Default organizer for submitted events: Makes the organizer fields already pre-populated for users visiting the event submission form. Users can override this and add a new organizer as they see fit.
* As the name indicates, these features are only available for PRO users.
That does it for the settings. Once you’ve configured the plugin as you want it, let’s go check out the form and try a test submission.
III. Finding the form and viewing your events list
How you access the form will differ depending on whether or not you have permalinks enabled. While most users do enable a pretty permalink structure on the site, it isn’t for everybody and so we’ve tried to accomodate both ends with this plugin. As in the video, we’ll cover finding the form / viewing your events list on a permalinks-enabled site first, then move into the shortcode-based approach for sites with permalinks off.
With pretty permalinks enabled, the frontend fields are accessible at the following URLs:
Add a new event: /events/community/add/
Events list: /events/community/list/
Specific page in events list: /events/community/list/page/[num]
Edit an already-submitted event: /events/community/edit/[id] ( redirects to /events/community/list/[post-type]/id )
Delete an already-submitted event: /events/community/delete/[id]
Where /events/ is the The Events Calendar slug defined on the main Settings –> The Events Calendar tab, and /community/ is the Community Events slug defined on the Community tab. In other words, you can tweak the first 2 parts of the URL as you see fit. These virtual pages will eventually be added to the WordPress menu (Appearance –> Menus) as custom items. In Community Events 1.0, however, this is not a feature.
No permalinks? No problem, we’ve got shortcodes. Keep in mind that shortcodes are only available for users who have permalinks turned off; this method will NOT work if you’re running with a pretty permalinks structure. These will also only work on pages, so don’t try them in posts/events/widgets/etc.
Create a page and use the following:
[tribe_community_events_title] as title
[tribe_community_events] in content
You can add this page to the menu as you see fit.
IV. Template overrides in Community Events
One last point worth noting, for the more customization-minded among you: any file in Community’s /views/ folder, along with the CSS stylesheet, can be overridden/extended by placing the same filename in the path above (in your theme folder). Icons can be overridden or added by placing them in: /events/community/statusname.png
Files in the parent theme will be used, unless files are found in the child theme in which case those will be used (just like WordPress’ hierarchy).
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Hopefully this has been of some value to you. Thanks for buying Community Events, and please let us know what we can do to improve it as we move towards 1.1 and beyond!
