Managing Calendar Events

Contents

1. Adding New Calendar Entries
2. Setting Up Recurring Calendar Items
   • Handling Multi-Day Events
3. Updating Calendar Entries
   • Search for an existing entry
   • Revise, don’t duplicate.
   • Scheduling a change or working on a draft
4. Categorizing Events
5. Adding Venues
6. Hiding Calendar Entries

1. Adding New Calendar Entries

To learn more about the basics of adding and editing posts using the WordPress editor, click here.

Navigation Path:

• Calendar -> Add New

Fields:

• Title – Title of the event, shown in the calendar listing, category pages, and usually on the single event item page.
• Content – Located below the title, shown on the single event item page. May also be used for the “Excerpt” if none specified.
• Excerpt – Quick summary of the event, between 20 – 80 words. Shown on calendar listing and category pages.
• Featured Image – Shown on the single event item page, category pages, and calendar listings.
• Event Categories – Used to organize the event and group it with similar events. For example, “Concerts” could be used to group together all music performances on the calendar.
• Event Venues – Used to group an event with others occurring at the same place, as well as list where an event is occurring.
• Event Data
  • Start Date – Used to specify the start date & time of the event.
  • End Date – Used to specify the end date & time of the event.
    (For more on handling multi-day events, see below)
  • All Day
  • Repeat
    • None
    • Daily
    • Weekly
    • Monthly
    • Yearly

2. Setting Up recurring Calendar Entries

Navigation Path:

• Calendar -> All Events

If your event occurs more than once, whether that’s every few days, a certain day of the week or month, or even just yearly, you can set it to automatically repeat, saving you work and keeping your calendar full!

• In the Event Data field, set your start date & end date.¹If your start & end date span multiple days, then each repeat of your event will span multiple days.
• Select a Repeat option
• Setup a Repeat Schedule
  • Repeat Interval – How often the event repeats, e.g. every X days, every X weeks, every X months, every X years.
  • Repeat Until – When the event stops repeating by date.
  • Excluded Dates – Dates where the event won’t appear, even if it should given the schedule.
  • Days of Week – Shown on the Weekly repeat option, determines what days of the week the event will appear on.
  • Repeat By – Shown on the Monthly repeat option
    • Day of Month – The event occurs on a specific day & week of the month, e.g. every Monday on the first week of the month.
    • Actual Date – The event occurs on a specific date of the month, e.g. every month on the 21st.

Once you’ve setup the repeat schedule, the repetition of the event will start after the start date you set passes.

Handling Multi-Day Events

Consider putting the event schedule into the event content, instead of using the start & end fields: If your event occurs over multiple days, it may be more intuitive to set the event to All Day and write out an event schedule on the Content of the event. This can be especially helpful if the event has different schedules or hours per day.

If the event does have the same schedule daily, then the start & end time fields can be used.

Repeats include the full event date range, not just the first day: If you setup a repeat schedule, remember that your schedule will include the full date range. So if your event spans the 21st – 23rd and you set it to repeat weekly on Monday, it will repeat every week on Monday – Wednesday.

3. Updating Calendar Entries

When creating or editing events, pay attention to the event URL. If the URL ends in “-2” or “-3” or any variation of that, e.g. www.example.com/calendar/my-event-6 that’s a sign an event with the same name may already exist.

In that case, consider choosing another name for your event, or finding the existing event and updating it instead.²If you rename your event, make sure to update the event URL by clicking the Event -> URL field and changing it to match your new event name.

Search for an existing entry

Go to Calendar -> All Events then in the search box, enter your event name and click Search Calendar to find existing events with the same name.

Revise, don’t duplicate.

Even if your event is changing significantly, it may be worth keeping the event URL the same if your audience for the event are going to come looking to the page again for details on the next occurrence of the event. This allows existing links to the event online to continue working.

If your event is changing completely, or the name is completely different – you can also setup a redirect to the new event.

Scheduling a change or working on a draft

If your event is still occurring or you would like to schedule a change to the event, you can rewrite & republish the post, optionally scheduling it to change out in the future.

4. Categorizing Events

Developing an effective categorization scheme for events can be an art as much as a science, some general principles for categorization are:

• Don’t over-categorize, it’s better to have a handful of large categories than many small ones. As a rule of thumb, if you can’t think of more than 3 events that could fit into a category, you should choose an existing one instead, if possible.
• Use sub-categories, if an event category is small with only a handful of events, place it under a relevant parent category. E.g. Festivals -> Brewfests. This allows search engines and visitors to explore the site with more context.³Change a categories’ parent by going to Calendar -> Event Categories then click the category and choose a parent. If you’re changing a category with a large number of links to it on the site or elsewhere, you may want to setup a redirect to keep the old link working.

5. Adding Venues

• Use the Event Venues option on events to specify one or more venues for the event.
• Once you’ve added a venue for the event, you can add an address for the venue by going to its new entry in the Calendar -> Event Venues menu.

6. Hiding Calendar Entries

• If you don’t want the event to be visible to the public at all, go to the event, then find the Event -> Visibility option and set it to Private.
• If you would like the link to still work for the public, but not display it in search engines, scroll down on the event editor, find Yoast SEO then expand it, click Advanced and change “Allow search engines to show this content in search results?” to “No.” Don’t forget to change this back if you’d like the event to be findable in search engines again.