[Plugin: The Events Calendar] Showing the Events on the home page

We have certainly heard the open source communities desire for a more complete integration between events and posts and will be working on ideas to help as part of 2.1.

@bwp / jonas – wondering is an options in settings like “Show events in main post loop” would help most of the frustrated users? Not sure the implications as this starts messing with theme territory, but if there is enough aye aye’s then we’ll look into it.

Hi Shane,

I think a setting like “Show events in main post loop” would be great. It would also be great if the TEC custom post type could support tags, which shouldn’t be difficult to do and would allow people an alternative to querying by category. Those who want certain event and non-event posts to be able to be grouped together could query by tag.

Thanks

Yup, tags is already handled in 2.1 (we are coding away). We decided to go with proper tags rather than a unique taxonomy for the exact reason you mentioned.

Well, for me it’s more about categories — I don’t even SHOW a post loop on the home page (other than via widgets). So I guess that “Show events in main post loop” wouldn’t really help me much?

But I guess my widgets (e.g., recent posts by category) might benefit? Not sure. Handsomeman provided a category hack that seems promising.

I don’t really grok the difference between tags and categories, other than that categories seem a lot more useful in WordPress.

You can actually write your own code and put it in the PHP widget. I posted some code for a Recent Events widget here:

https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/plugin-the-events-calendar-template-tag-help-please?replies=5

Which is great (and admirable) but then becomes something that I need to become responsible for wherever I add it, living through upgrades, informing site owners, etc. It gets away from the easy parts assembly I thought the plugins and widgets were supposed to represent… At some point we’d have to ask whether it makes sense to use a “plug-in” that required so much manual tweaking, especially when right now the deprecated version still works so seamlessly for us…

Don’t get me wrong, Jonas, I much appreciate the code / idea. Thanks.

@bwp – updated internal notes to have a setting called “Show events in post loop”. So there they will show in main / cat / tag / archive …

=) if there are no unsurmountable technical hurdles, it sounds like this should get you where you wanted?

Also keep in mind that my code example does not contain any code that is specific to this plugin. It’s all standard WordPress code and therefore there is no reason why you would have to maintain it unless you wanted to make some cosmetic changes of your own choosing.

Also keep in mind that the plugin does come with widgets. I really wrote that for a site that does not use widgets.

@jonas Grumby
Thanks for the link it had the info I needed to display the menus and the events on the homepage.

add_filter('pre_get_posts', 'query_post_type');
function query_post_type($query) {
if(is_archive() || is_tag() || is_home() && empty( $query->query_vars['suppress_filters'] ) ) {
$post_type = get_query_var('post_type');
if($post_type)
$post_type = $post_type;
else
$post_type = array('post','tribe_events','attachment','nav_menu_item');
$query->set('post_type',$post_type);
return $query;
}
}

Added ‘nav_menu_item’ in the $post_type = array
Thanks!

Thanks guys, but Shane I’m a bit confused by your last comment. Just including the events in the post loop will make their corresponding categories usable in non-TEC contexts? I thought I’d still need something like handsomeman’s hack in order to do anything useful with categories and TEC 2.x. (I’ve described this before, but I just use multiple category assignments to make a single event/post appear in multiple listings and under multiple menus along with other normal posts and galleries that are related to that post/event.)

Shane? Rob? This thread may scroll away pretty soon…

I was hoping somebody might be able to give me a quick answer to a more vague question regarding this topic.

If I want to just display the Month View Calendar on the home page, what file do I need to add the template tag to and in what format?

I understand that there are various template tags for this plugin, but I’m not even really sure where it goes.

(I’m hoping the green will start coming off sooner or later)

@nickbumgarner If you use a custom menu, you can create a page called Home and assign the calendar URL to it. In Settings > Reading you would also have to choose that page as your home page.