Events Calendar

This section covers adding events, showing the calendar, taking registrations, accepting event submissions and moving from The Events Calendar. Requirements and known limits are covered outside this section.

Add an event

Open Events → Add New, give the event a title and a description, then fill in Event Details:

• Start and End are dates and times in the event’s Time zone. Turn on All-day event to hide the times.
• Venue lists the venues you’ve already saved. You can also type a new venue name, and it is created when you save the event. Organizers works the same way, and an event can have more than one organizer.
• Cost, Event website and Featured are optional. Featured events are highlighted in calendar views and can be filtered on their own.

Group events with Events → Categories. Venues and organizers have their own screens under Events, with addresses, phone numbers, websites and emails.

Repeat an event

Use the Recurrence box when an event happens more than once.

• Repeats can be daily, weekly, monthly or yearly, every one or more intervals.
• Weekly events can repeat on several weekdays.
• Monthly events can repeat on the Same day of the month or the Same weekday (e.g. first Tuesday). If the event falls on the fifth week of a month, it repeats on the last weekday.
• Ends can be never, after a number of occurrences, or on a date.
• Skip dates takes one date per line (YYYY-MM-DD) for dates when the event does not happen.

Next occurrences previews upcoming dates. Click Edit only this occurrence to split one date into its own event. That date is then skipped in the series.

Show the calendar

The events archive at /events/ shows the calendar with your default view. Visitors can switch between the views you enabled and page through months or days.

To place a calendar anywhere else:

• Add the Events Calendar block. Choose the view, a category, whether to show only featured events, the number of events for the list view, and whether to show the view switcher.

• Or use the shortcode, for example [gf_events view="list" category="workshops" limit="5" switcher="false"]. Other attributes are venue, featured and date (YYYY-MM-DD).

Each event page shows the date, venue with a map, organizers, cost, other upcoming dates and Add to calendar links for Google Calendar, Outlook and iCal. The calendar’s Subscribe to calendar (iCal) link gives visitors a feed they can add to their calendar app.

Take registrations

1. Build a Gravity Forms form for registrations, for example with name and email fields.
2. Edit the event and choose that form under Registration form in the Registration box.
3. Optionally set Capacity per occurrence. Leave it blank for unlimited.

The form is shown on the event page. Each entry is linked to the event and to the date the visitor registered for, so recurring events track capacity for each date separately. When an occurrence is full, the form is replaced with a notice. The Registration box shows how many people have registered for upcoming dates and links to their entries.

To let visitors pick the event on the form itself, add the Event field from Advanced Fields. It lists upcoming dates of events that use this form, or of events with no registration form set, and hides dates that are full.

Use these merge tags in notifications and confirmations: {event_title}, {event_date}, {event_start}, {event_end}, {event_venue}, {event_url}, {event_ics_url} and {event_google_url}.

Paid registrations work with Gravity Forms payment add-ons. Add product fields to the form as usual.

Accept event submissions

Use a feed when visitors should be able to suggest events.

1. Build a form with at least a title, a start date and, optionally, a start time, end date, end time, description, venue, organizer and image upload fields.
2. Open the form’s Settings → Events Calendar → Add New.
3. Set Event status. Pending review is the default, so nothing is published until you approve it.
4. Map Title and Start date, plus any other fields you collected. Default length (minutes) sets the end time when no end is mapped.
5. Optionally map the Venue and Organizer fields. A venue or organizer with the same name is reused; otherwise a new one is created with the event’s status.

Each submission creates one event, and the entry gets a note that links to it. Use {created_event_url} and {created_event_edit_url} in admin notifications to review new events.

Import from The Events Calendar

Open Events → Import from TEC. The page lists how many events, venues, organizers and categories were found, and Start import copies them in batches. You can also run wp gf-events import-tec from WP-CLI (--dry-run previews the counts).

• The import can run again safely. Items already imported are skipped.
• TEC does not have to be active, because the importer reads its data straight from the database.
• Simple recurring series are imported as one recurring event. Series this add-on can’t represent, such as multiple rules or exclusion rules other than dates, are imported as one event per date. The final report lists how many of each were created.
• TEC data is not changed or deleted. Check the imported events before you deactivate TEC.