Vent - events system
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The Vent events system allows you to use the standard WordPress scheduled posts functionality to enter, list and manage future events.
The administrator can setup the criteria that the Vent system uses to identify an Event. This enables you to continue to enter scheduled posts into WordPress (and more importantly, for them to function exactly as before) whilst still using the new Event functionality.
The simplest criteria is to mark any events with a distinct category or tag, alternatively you can use any combination of the settings shown above, including looking for a string at the start of a post title (such as “Event:”).
Installation
The Vent system is compatible with standard WordPress and WordPress MU. The version of WordPress you have will determine where you install the plugins files.
Standard WordPress
- Download and unarchive the plugins Zip file. This will create a vent directory on your computer
- Upload the Vent directory (and it’s contents) to the wp-content/plugins directory of your WordPress install.
- Log in to your WordPress administration system, go to the Plugins page and Activate the Vent plugin.
WordPress MU
- Download and unarchive the plugins Zip file. This will create a vent directory on your computer.
- Open the vent directory so that you can see the files it contains.
- Upload the vent.php and ventincludes directory (and it’s contents) into the wp-content/mu-plugins directory of your WordPress MU install.
- Plugins placed in the mu-plugins directory are automatically activated.
Enabling the Vent system
Once the plugin is activated, it will remain in an disabled state. This is because you have yet to tell the system how to identify an event from a post. Before enabling the system you need to make a decision about how you would like to mark your future events.
As mentioned before the simplest option is to create a new category or tag called something like “Event” and mark every future event with that category or tag.
Let us, for arguments sake, assume that we have created a tag on our system called “event” and will be using that to identify all of our events.
Goto the Settings page in your WordPress administration system and click on the Vent sub-menu.
On this page you will see a series of settings, for now we will deal with the main ones. Go through each of the settings listed below and switch them to your liking.
- Event identifier - In our example we are using the tag “event”, so I will select my tag in the second line and leave the other two lines (1 and 3) alone.
- Highlight on Home page - The Vent system can automatically display the next (upcoming) event at the top of your blog/sites home page. If you would like the next event displayed on your page then selected “Enabled” here. The second option on this line concerns the styles that are applied to the event. This can help mark the next event out from the rest of your posts. You have the option of using the plugins own styles, or disabling the style generation and using those set up in your themes style sheet.
- Internal highlight style - If you chose to use the plugins Internal styles then this is were you can change them. The most important part of these style is the post identifier (#post-%postid%). The Vent plugin will replace the %postid% value with the ID number of the next event so that it is only that post that the styles are applied to. If your theme doesn’t use the #post-xx naming convention, then you will need to change this setting.
- Make past events into posts - Setting this to “Enabled” will reset any historical events back into posts. This will ensure that the events remain with your blog/sites post hiearchy and show up in the correct historical position.
- hCalendar status - The Vent system adds some hCalendar markup to each event. You can use this setting to decide how this information is displayed. hCalendar markup enables other sites and search engines to find and parse the event information on your blog/site.
- hCalendar export link - This allows you to add a link to a hCalendar parsing website from your Events details. There are a number of these sites (including Technorati) that can parse the hCalendar information held on your page and return an iCal file that you can import into a calendar application (such as Google Calendar, iCal or Outlook).
Once you have set up these options, set the Vent system status option to “Enabled” and then save the options by clicking on the button at the bottom of the page. We will go over the other options available a little later on.
Now you can start adding some events into your system.
Adding an Event
To add an event you simply go to the Write menu and start entering the details just as you would with a normal WordPress post.
Once you have entered the details about your event, click on the “Edit” link next to the Publish immediately text on the right hand side of the Post page.
This will open the date and time form so that you can enter the Start Date and Start Time of your event.
Once you have entered the starting date and time, you next need to enter the end date and time. Unfortunately WordPress doesn’t provide a standard form for this, so instead we need to add a key field to our post.
Scroll down towards the bottom of the Post page until you see a box labelled “Custom Fields”, if it is closed then click on the little arrow to its left.
Into the form that is displayed, we need to enter something like the following:
The Key is “event_enddate”. The value is the date and time in the format YYYY-MM-DD HH:Mins. The system will recognise other formats, but this one is the safest and most reliable.
After entering the end date and time, click on the “Add Custom Field” button. You are then ready to Publish your post. Scroll back up to the top of the page and click “Publish” at the top right hand side.
Once your post is published, click on the Manage menu and you should now see something similar to the image at the very top of this page, with your new post identified as an event.
Viewing Events
If you set up your blog/site to show the next event at the top of the home page, then navigating to your site should show the post you have just entered at the top of the page.
There are also two sidebar widgets available (if you theme supports them) to show the Next Event or a list of up to 15 Upcoming events.
Some examples of Event views
Event Pages
The final options that we skipped on the Settings -> Vent menu allow us to set up page URL’s specifically to show our events.
You should only change these options if you understand them. The default settings will work for most (english based) websites.
An example of the default settings is (assuming your site is myblog.com):
- http://myblog.com/events/today - will show all the events taking place today
- http://myblog.com/events/nextweek - will show all the events taking place next week
- and so on…
The final option on the settings page allows you to reset all of the posts that you have marked as events, back to what they would be if the Vent system wasn’t being used. If you decide to stop using the Vent system, then you should do this prior to deleting the plugin.
Download
Click on the link below to download the latest version of the Vent system
Support
I have setup a Google Code repository for the Vent system that incorporates a support and Issue tracker, so please use that for any issues you find..
