Posted: June 19, 2017 at 7:31 am
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Hi, Is there a way to make the event list more like “Featured Content”? What I am looking for is a horizontal list of events that works more like a slider that I can use on my home page. Currently, I am using a Featured Content plugin to do this, but the having to update these every time I create an event or one expires is tedious. Seems like I should be able to make the event list do this. Any suggestions you have would be appreciated and I am currently using the Divi theme if that helps. Thanks! |
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Hi Joseph, There is a way to add support for Featured Content with custom post types (which EE events are custom post types). This a stackexchange topic that walks through adding support within the twentyfourteen theme: The code will not be the same with Divi, but Divi adds support for Featured Content in a similar fashion (or even your featured content plugin) you should be able to apply the same ideas from the stackexchange thread. |
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That’s not going to work for me. As an alternative, is there a way to customize the events list so it looks more like the Events Calendar Table Template that was available for EE3? Honestly, the events list looks extremely dull in this theme I have little control over it’s format without tearing in the the backend because custom post types forbid the use of the Dive Builder…The featured images NEVER look right or are the size I need them to be, and the integration here with Divi seems to be a roadblock for me at every turn. Mainly because of the lack of support for Custom Post types. You tell me to go look somewhere else, and Divi says “good luck with that…we don’t support customized options”. It shouldn’t be so painful to get a simple list of events that look reasonably decent! |
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Hi Joseph, May I ask why will that not work for you?
Yes this is possible. It will involve building a custom event list template (and a fair amount of CSS, but that could be copied over from the EE3 plugin). You can follow this guide to set up a template to start with: https://eventespresso.com/wiki/ee4-custom-post-types/#archive_event_template
I agree with you. Event Espresso doesn’t attempt to override a theme’s styles though. This way the event list will look more like the rest of the site. So for example if Divi’s (or any other theme’s) featured images are set to a specific size for post archives, then Event Espresso doesn’t come along and reset those sizes. If it did the sizes would likely not fit with the rest of the layout of the page. Have you checked with Elegant theme’s to see if they can help you with setting the featured image sizes and layout? Those will be the same as the blog archive, so if they tell you they won’t help because it’s a custom post type archive, you can ask them for help with the standard blog archive. |
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It wont work for me for the reasons explained. I don’t have that kind of time on my hands, and you’re talking about hours of work…for something I feel I continue to pay for to work correctly! Not just to you, but to Divi as well. It’s starting to seem as though I might as well just build my own site from scratch given the endless hours I am forced to spend researching and making customizations for the simplest of things. Between EE and Divi it’s maddening. Incidentally, “…copied over from the EE3 plugin” isn’t going to work for me either. It assumes I have the plugin and I don’t. Once again, “building a custom event list template” means HOURS of work for me. All I want is a simple, half-way decent looking list of events on my home page. The fact that I can’t have that without dedicating hours upon hours of time and work is simply infuriating. Sorry, I know I am ranting, but seriously guys? I’ve been in IT for 25 years. It shouldn’t be this difficult for a product that is not open source. Why is the Calendar List that was available for EE3 not available for EE4? Seems that would be yet another option unavailable to me. Look at this event list..simple, to the point and looks reasonably decent. This should not be a lot to ask for. Can you tell me how to get that in a box one-third of my home page without neglecting my home life and other responsibilities while reinventing he wheel? If so, please tell me. Arg. |
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Hi Joseph, If you don’t have the time to do the custom design like in that other site, you could start with a theme that uses a similar layout, like this one: https://wordpress.org/themes/fusion-base/ So instead of trying to shoehorn a design into Divi, it may be a better use of time to use a readymade theme that looks great out of the box, or even if it only looks good, it could be great with a minimal amount of CSS changes. With regards to the Calendar list plugin from EE3:
The reason that it’s not available for EE4 is because in EE3, an event could really only have one date. In EE4 there can be many datetimes for one event. So the loop from the EE3 plugin would not work with EE4.
I get your frustration, but maybe there’s a misunderstanding because you mention that Event Espresso is not being open source. Event Espresso is actually 100% open source and GPL licensed. Anyone can download the code from Github and we pull requests come in from the community which get merged in. I’m not asserting that an open source product shouldn’t work well or look nice though. Being in IT for 25 years you no doubt understand that a product will have certain goals and priorities. In the case of a WordPress plugin like Event Espresso, much of the development work is centered around function. Most of the time with WordPress sites, the theme has the goal and priority of handling the form. It’s actually intentional on EE4’s part to not override what a theme does with respect to the layout, sizes of featured images and so on. |
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I get that, but if you’re going to rely on the theme to configure it, it should at very least be compatible with the theme! In this case, the custom post types prevent me from doing just about anything without hours of “tinkering”, and in this case I don’t even have something as simple as the Divi builder available to me without some more time consuming adjustments. The reason I purchased both products and continue to pay support for them is that I want to reduce the amount of time I spend having to tinker around and doing actual development! It seems like there’s very little in the product I am not forced to tinker with because of this issue. I’ll take a look at the Fusion Base theme and see what it might be able to do for me, but again I am seriously considering just building my own solution at this point. It’s quickly approaching being more hassle than it’s worth, and not being a full blown PHP developer is not helping matters. If I wanted to be a PHP developer, I don’t think I would need WordPress or EE right? Kind of defeats the purpose if you know what I mean. Anyway, thanks. |
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I don’t actually know what you mean by “defeats the purpose”. If you didn’t have a starting point with WordPress, a plugin that does all of the functionality, and a theme, how would that be a quicker solution? There are thousands of developer hours built into these things, and you want to start from scratch because you don’t like the way the Divi theme looks? |
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It’s not just how it looks Josh. I can’t even begin to tell you how many tweaks I’ve had to make to this software in the past two years for the simplest of things. It might interest you to know that I gave up months ago on even using the built in event pages that are *supposed* to be displayed because I couldn’t 1. Make them look anything like my site design without the Divi Builder, and 2. I can’t list, grid, or filter them anywhere on the site because of the custom post type issue. As such, I’ve had to resort to duplicating the functionality as a regular post so I could use the Divi builder, filter them, list them, and add some of them as featured content on my home page. You want to take a crack at hour many hours I spent just trying to make what *should* already work actually work? I finally just gave up. As of now, I am forced to create two separate pages and have to make manual updates to my site every time an event passes and remove it from three or four different locations. All this, and of course I haven’t been able to use the event list default page and had to create my own quasi-event page based on posts I have to manually remove/expire. Yes, I could get a “Post Expirator” plugin as yet another band-aid, but where do I draw the line here? Maybe we should talk about the Promotions add-on I paid for that I can’t use and even got charged for support fees recently because the text field for the discount code runs the entire length of the page it’s added to and you can’t even find it on a mobile device. Again, sorry for the “ranting” here, but you asked…and yes, with all the hours I’ve spent messing around with this and trying to make it work, I am confident I could have built something that would do what I need it to do in far less amount of time. I bought EE (and Divi) based on numerous reviews and articles and it wasn’t like I didn’t do my research beforehand. Finally, please keep in mind that I have a presence on no less than 7 different social media sites that I also need to keep up with. One would think my own web site would be the easiest…It’s not, and frankly it’s really beginning to get under my skin at this juncture. Please tell me what good the “thousands of development hours” are doing for me personally if I can’t even use the basic event pages and lists, or have the simplest of event items on my home page? To be completely honest here, the only thing in the software that I am actually using and needing today is the Paypal payment function…and I don’t really need EE for that. I’m just too burned out on trying to fix other the things to do anything about it! Believe me when I say I appreciate the thousands of hours invested, but those hours are just not benefiting me much personally as a paying customer if I *still* have to go in and spend my own hours tweaking every little thing in the software and it still doesn’t do what it’s supposed to be doing for me. As a consumer, that’s just right back to square one as I see it. If I am doing something wrong here, just tell me. I just don’t understand why every single time I need something I am asked to go in and start tearing in to PHP code, asked to pour over stackoverflow articles, or worse…being told too bad, so sad, we don’t support the stuff you thought you had already paid for to have! |
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So since Divi builder doesn’t support custom post types (which is a WordPress standard) why use the Divi theme? The specific issue you’re having with the event archive list is mentioned on the known third party issues page, with a solution: https://eventespresso.com/wiki/known-third-party-plugin-theme-conflicts/#divi So at the very least you can have a native event list with Divi. For some reason that might make sense to the Divi dev team, you’ll need to activate the Blog style mode.
If you can post a link to an event page on your site we can give you a CSS fix that will help with that discount code field. Normally the promotion code field doesn’t do that, but it’s possible there’s some other CSS on your site that’s set for changing other inputs that’s having an affect on the promotions input. |
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