Dan-Lucian Stefancu

Manuel Schmalstieg

<p>This plugin (MEM or Minimalistic Event Manager) is intended for theme authors and developers who want a simple, robust and flexible solution for managing event dates.</p>
<p>The MEM plugin offers a clean interface that allows to add <em>event dates</em> (start dates, end dates, repeating dates) to <em>posts</em> (and to any custom post type).</p>
<h4>The main features</h4>
<ul>
<li>Event dates can be attached to any post type: Posts, Pages, Custom Post Types… (optionally, they can be restricted to specific content types).</li>
<li>Event dates can be of three types: start dates, end dates, repeating dates.</li>
<li>There is no mandatory date format: Time, Day, and Month are optional. An event date could be “January 2046”, or just “2046”.</li>
</ul>
<h4>What the plugin doesn’t do</h4>
<p>The MEM plugin works as a simple interface for entering those dates into custom fields, but it won’t do much on the public side of your theme (there’s a simple widget for displaying a list of events).</p>
<p>The plugin was created primarily to enable theme developers to create their own display of events on the front-end.</p>
<p>If you aren’t sure how to achieve this, <a href="https://github.com/ms-studio/minimalistic-event-manager/wiki" rel="nofollow ugc">our wiki</a> will provide a collection of examples to get you started.</p>
<h4>Technical implementation</h4>
<p>Technically, the MEM plugin stores the dates as ordinary Custom Fields, in a <em>machine-readable</em> format (such as “2016-11-23 13:37”). This gives you absolute freedom for displaying your events in your theme:</p>
<ul>
<li>You can query for specific date ranges by using the meta_key / meta_compare parameters.</li>
<li>You can use the php <code>date</code> function to display the date in any possible manner (or <code>date_i18n</code> for proper localization).</li>
</ul>
<h4>Plugin options</h4>
<p>The plugin has two settings that can be modified with a few lines in your <code>functions.php</code> file:</p>
<ul>
<li>You can limit it to specific post types.</li>
<li>You can use an “alpha” mode, which gives you a blank input field for each date. This can be useful if you need to enter dates that don’t fit the predefined format.</li>
</ul>
<p>See the online documentation for the full instructions.</p>
<h4>Links</h4>
<p><a href="https://github.com/ms-studio/minimalistic-event-manager/wiki" rel="nofollow ugc"><strong>Documentation</strong></a></p>
<h4>Credits</h4>
<ul>
<li><strong>Concept and maintenance</strong> <a href="http://ms-studio.net" rel="nofollow ugc">ms-studio.net</a></li>
<li><strong>Initial development</strong>: <a href="http://dreamproduction.net/" rel="nofollow ugc">Dream Production</a></li>
</ul>


Minimalistic Event Manager

A simple and flexible solution for managing event dates.

Atte Moisio

<p>The purpose of this plugin is to add an event type similar to the normal post type. By design this plugin doesn’t provide any ready-made layouts, and allows the events to be fully integrated and customized to the theme of your choosing.</p>
<h3>Current Features</h3>
<ul>
<li>Admin pages to view/create/modify events.</li>
<li>Available data fields for events: start date, end date, venue, category</li>
<li>Create weekly or biweekly recurring events</li>
<li>Fully customizable widget for displaying upcoming events.</li>
</ul>
<p>The custom post type created by the plugin is named ‘am_event’ and has two taxonomies: ‘am_event_categories’ and ‘am_venues’. Dates are stored as post metadata. Displaying the events is done in the theme files using WP_Query and the template tags provided by the plugin. This allows full control over the layout and what elements to show.</p>
<p>The widget for displaying upcoming events uses a simple template system for full control of the layout.</p>
<p>If you think something critical is missing, feel free to send me a request.</p>
<p>The plugin is available in the following languages (pot-file included for additional translations):</p>
<ul>
<li>English</li>
<li>French</li>
<li>Norwegian</li>
<li>Finnish</li>
</ul>
<h3>TUTORIAL</h3>
<p>For integrating AM Events to an existing theme, I suggest creating a <a href="https://codex.wordpress.org/Child_Themes" rel="nofollow ugc">child theme</a> with custom page templates. You can find an example of a working Twenty Twelve child theme from <a href="https://github.com/attemoi/am-events-child-theme" rel="nofollow ugc">https://github.com/attemoi/am-events-child-theme</a> containing three different page templates for event pages.</p>
<h4>Widget</h4>
<p>Here are the shortcodes available in the upcoming events widget template.</p>
<ul>
<li>[event-title]</li>
<li>[start-date]</li>
<li>[end-date]</li>
<li>[event-venue]</li>
<li>[event-category]</li>
<li>[content]</li>
<li>[thumbnail]</li>
<li>[excerpt]</li>
<li>[permalink]</li>
<li>[meta]</li>
</ul>
<p>Conditional shortcodes:</p>
<ul>
<li>[if cond=”startdate-is-enddate”]</li>
<li>[if cond=”startdate-not-enddate”]</li>
<li>[if cond=”startday-is-endday”]</li>
<li>[if cond=”startday-not-endday”]</li>
<li>[if cond=”has-venue”]</li>
<li>[if cond=”has-category”]</li>
</ul>
<p>The title can be linked to the event post with the ‘link’ attribute, e.g. [event-title link=true]</p>
<p>The category and venue can also be linked similarly to their respective archive pages using the ‘link’ attribute, e.g. [event-category link=true]</p>
<p>The number of words displayed in the title, content or excerpt can be limited by the ‘limit’ attribute, e.g. [content limit=25] or [event-title limit=10].</p>
<p>The dates can be formatted using the ‘format’ attribute, e.g. [start-date format=’d.m.Y H:i’] (see <a href="http://php.net/manual/en/function.date.php" rel="nofollow ugc">PHP date</a> for formatting options). If no format is given, the default WordPress date format is used.</p>
<p>You can use any shortcode as many times as needed in a single template. To separate date and time of start date for example you could write:</p>
<pre><code>[start-date format='d.m.Y']
<span>divider</span>
[start-date format='H:i']
</code></pre>
<p>Example usage of conditional shortcode:</p>
<pre><code>[start-date format='D d.m.Y H:s']
[if cond='startdate-not-enddate']
 - [end-date format='D d.m.Y H:s']
[/if]
</code></pre>
<h4>Template tags</h4>
<p>Template tags were introduced in version 1.3.0 and are listed below. More documentation can be found in the source files.</p>
<pre><code>// Template tags for getting and displaying event dates
am_the_startdate($format = 'Y-m-d H:i:s', $before = '', $after = '', $echo = true)
am_get_the_startdate( $format = 'Y-m-d H:i:s', $post = 0 )
am_the_enddate($format = 'Y-m-d H:i:s', $before = '', $after = '', $echo = true)
am_get_the_enddate( $format = 'Y-m-d H:i:s', $post = 0 )

// Template tags for getting and displaying event venues
am_get_the_venue( $id = false )
am_in_venue( $venue, $post = null )
am_get_the_venue_list( $separator = '', $parents='', $post_id = false )
am_the_venue( $separator = '', $parents='', $post_id = false )

// Template tags for getting and displaying event categories
am_get_the_event_category( $id = false )
am_get_the_event_category_list( $separator = '', $parents='', $post_id = false )
am_in_event_category( $eventCategory, $post = null )
am_the_event_category( $separator = '', $parents='', $post_id = false )
</code></pre>
<p>Example of displaying the first category of the current event post:</p>
<pre><code>$categoryArray = am_get_the_event_category();
echo $categoryArray[0]->name;<h3>Creating a WP_Query</h3>
</code></pre>
<p>The custom post type is named ‘am_event’<br />
The taxonomies are named ‘am_venues’ and ‘am_event_categories’.</p>
<p>The event post has metadata named ‘am_startdate’ and ‘am_enddate’ that are formatted like ‘yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm’</p>
<p>So suppose I wanted to display all events with a category of ‘other’ and venue ‘mcdonalds’. I would then make a WP_Query like this:</p>
<pre><code>$args = array(
        'post_type' => 'am_event',
        'post_status' => 'publish',
        'tax_query' => array(
                'relation' => 'AND',
                array(
                    'taxonomy' => 'am_venues',
                    'field' => 'name',
                    'terms' => 'mcdonalds',
                ),
                array(
                    'taxonomy' => 'am_event_categories',
                    'field' => 'name',
                    'terms' => 'other'
                ),
        ),
    );

$the_query = new WP_Query($args);

if ($the_query->have_posts()) {
    while ($the_query->have_posts()) {
        $the_query->the_post();

        $postId = $post->ID;

        // Use template tags to get start and end date
        $startDate = am_get_the_startdate('Y-m-d H:i:s');
        $endDate = am_get_the_enddate('Y-m-d H:i:s');

        // Use template tags to get venues and categories in an array
        $venues = am_get_the_venue( $postId );
        $eventCategories = am_get_the_category( $postId );

        // All the other functions used for posts like
        // the_title() and the_content() work just like with normal posts.

        // ...  DISPLAY POST CONTENT HERE ... //

    }
}
</code></pre>
<p>If you want the events ordered by start date, add the following to $args:</p>
<pre><code>'orderby' => 'meta_value',
'meta_key' => 'am_startdate',
'order' => 'ASC',
</code></pre>
<p>If you need to display only upcoming events, add the following meta_query argument to $args:</p>
<pre><code>'meta_query' => array(
        array(
            'key' => 'am_enddate',
            'value' => date('Y-m-d H:i:s', time()),
            'compare' => ">",
        ),
),
</code></pre>
<p>The plugin folder also contains a file “examples.php”, which contains an example function for displaying upcoming events in a table.</p>


AM Events

This event plugin is a great foundation to build a custom calendar implementation on top of. It works well and provides many powerful options right out of the box.



Powerful, flexible, easy to mod

This plugin got loads of nice features unfortunately it hasn't been updated for quiet a while now.

I tried to use this plugin on a site the other day but unfortunately the date picker didn't returned the right format as well as the date field value send is not converted correctly to an unix timestamp it somehow always returns 0. Leaving you with only "1970-01-01 00:00:00" dates. Please look into this issue try different translations. I'm sure you have to use php's function strtotime() here.

Good luck,

Cheers Fleuv

Dead or still maintained

Manage and display your events. Allows fully customizable layouts and includes a widget for upcoming events.

Minimalistic Event Manager vs AM Events