How to Create and Manage Events on Your WordPress Site

It doesn’t matter what type of website you have; you may need to create an event at some point. And some websites may need to arrange events on a regular basis.

In any of these cases, you need a reliable solution to create and manage events on your WordPress site. And that is what I will discuss today.

As you can already guess, there are lots of event management plugins available for WordPress. However, I will use The Events Calendar plugin for this tutorial. This plugin offers a simple interface and comes with all the necessary options.

So, without further ado, let’s find out how to create and manage events on your WordPress site by using The Events Calendar plugin.

Creating a New Event

First of all, you need to download and install the plugin. Once you activate it, you will notice a new menu item titled “Events” in your dashboard menu.

Go to Events > Add New to add a new event. This will take you to a page like the following –

As you can see, the page looks very similar to the regular content editor. The first option enables you to provide a title for the event. Then, there is the event description section. Since this is the regular text editor, you can use all the available formatting options.

Next, provide the event start and end time in the “Time & Date” section. It is also possible to mark it as an all-day event.

The next option is for the event location. Here, you can create a new location along with the detailed address, phone, and venue website. You can also choose to show the location on Google Maps on the event page. Your venue details will be saved so that you can use this venue again in the future.

Then, you will find a section for creating the event organizer. You can provide the phone, website, and email address for the organizer. The organizer information will also be saved for future usage.

Provide the event website URL on the “Event Website” section. If this is a premium event, you can define the event cost, currency symbol, and position in the “Event Cost” section.

You can choose the event tags, category, and featured images from the right sidebar. You will also find some additional options to hide this event from the event listings, make it sticky in the month view, and feature the event.

Once you have made the changes, click “Publish” to publish your event.

Managing Your Events

You can manage all of your events from the Events > Events page. The page looks like the following –

For each event, you will find the event title, author, category, tags, start date, and end date. It is also possible to edit, delete, or check out a preview of the event.

When creating a new event, you are adding some new information like the tags, category, location, and organizer. The plugin will save all this information so that you can use these in your future events. You can edit or delete this information by checking out the respective sub-menus under the “Events” menu.

According to the default settings, all of your events will be listed on the events page –

www.yoursite.com/events

And the single events will have a URL like the following –

www.yoursite.com/event/event-name

It is also possible to customize the URL. You can do that from the settings section, which I will discuss shortly.

As you create new events, you will add more venues and organizers. You can manage all of your venues from the Events > Venues page. In the similar way, you will find all the existing organizers in the Events > Organizers page. Hover over a venue or organizer to edit, delete, or view it.

Setting Up the Event Options

Go to Events > Settings to configure the event settings options for your website. The options are divided into several tabs. Let’s check these one at a time –

General

In “General Setting,” you can choose the number of events to display on the events page, enable comments for the events, and add the events to the main blog section.

Next, you will find two separate options to customize the URL slug for the events page and the single event page. It is recommended that the events slug should be plural, while the single event slug will be singular.

Then, you will find some more options to choose the end of day cutoff time, default currency symbol, position, enable Google Maps, choose the default zoom level for the map, and so on.

Click “Save Changes” to save the changes you have made so far.

Display

This section enables you to choose the style for your events and the single event pages. First of all, you can choose the default stylesheet for the event template. You have three options – Skeleton style that will include the basic styles, Full style that will try to match your currently active theme style, and the Tribe Events style that will apply the plugin style.

“Enable event views” allows you to choose which views will be available on the events page. You can select a default view in the next field.

In “Date Format Setting,” you will find separate options to define the formats for the date with and without the year, month and year format, date time separator, time range separator, and the date-picker date format.

Next, “Advanced Template Settings” enables you to add custom text before or after the event content. It is possible to provide formatted text or HTML code.

Once you have made the necessary changes, click “Save Changes” to apply your settings.

Final Words

The Events Calendar is a very powerful plugin that makes it a lot easier to manage various types of events on your WordPress site. Now that you have read this step-by-step tutorial, you know how to use this plugin to create and manage any type of event on your website.

So, what do you think about the plugin? Does it come with all the event management features you need? Let me know in the comments below.