Capping Recurring End Date

[Daniel Veaner]

I have Events Calendar Pro and I need help limiting recurring events. My installation is set up to let anyone enter an event, then I moderate it a few times a week. I want to limit recurring events to a maximum of one year, because we have had some people choosing “Never” and a few months later asking us to change it for them. Our site is a free community service, so it is reasonable to ask people to reenter their events once a year.

Is there a way (either in the settings or in the code) to limit recurring events? I would want to suppress “Never” and limit the end date to one year after the first occurrence.

Thanks very much,

[Barry]

Hi!

That’s a great question.

It’s worth bearing in mind first of all though that even if a recurring event truly never ends, by default we don’t (and of course could not) create an infinite number of event instances.

In allowing this to be specified though we did recently introduce some constraints which are adjustable via the General Events Settings screen:

• Clean up recurring events after (default: 24 months)
• Create recurring events in advance for (default: 24 months)

These effectively create a buffer period and so – assuming defaults – you would never have more than 4 years worth of recurring events and initially only 2 years worth would be created. You could of course further reduce this to enforce a buffer that means you only have 1 years worth of any given recurring event.

Would that be a viable way forward here?

[Daniel Veaner]

Yes, that does work, thank you. I set it to 12, created an event to occur monthly, set it to Never and it only made 12. I created another event and chose an end date three years from now, but it only created 12. So this does work, thanks!

Along these lines I would like to be able to add other limits. For example, let’s say someone entered a daily recurring event for the entire 12 months. I would consider that an abuse, and I would have to delete 365 events. Having a way to suppress specific instances of recurring events like that so they cannot be entered would be great.

Finally, I would like to alert people to the fact that “Never” means 12 months worth. Can you help me find the location in the template where I can put this message? I would like to locate it below the Recurrence drop down in the Event Time and Date section.

Thanks again,

Dan

[Barry]

Great!

Along these lines I would like to be able to add other limits … Having a way to suppress specific instances of recurring events like that so they cannot be entered would be great.

That’s not a bad idea and you can post requests for new features/functionality over on our UserVoice page 🙂

Finally, I would like to alert people to the fact that “Never” means 12 months worth. Can you help me find the location in the template where I can put this message?

Certainly 🙂

The first thing to do if you haven’t already done so is review our Themer’s Guide which covers the basics of safely overriding and customizing our templates.

In this case, you are probably going to be especially interested in the community/modules/recurrence.php template – somewhere in there you’ll see a line like this:

<select name="recurrence[type]">

You might place your custom message right above that (but of course you can play around with this and, should anything break, simply start afresh by wiping your custom template and copying and pasting in the original again).

Does that help?

[Barry]

Hi! It’s been a while so I’m going to go ahead and close this thread. If we can help with anything else, though, please don’t hesitate to create new threads as needed. Thanks!

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