Events with multiple dates/times as a single event.

  • I know recurring events are a thing but is there a way to display them as only ONE entry in the event list? My question is specifically about theatre shows. Everything including the location is exactly the same for all performances, but if we have a run of 8 shows a week for 6 weeks, then it displays as 48 events in the loops, widgets, etc., and no one can see the other shows in the season. Is there a way to display it as only one entry with, say “July 2 – August 15”, and then have it link to a single ‘single-event.php’ page where I can just list all of the dates? I’m coding a custom theme so snippets are fine. Perhaps there’s some kind of id that gets applied to all of the events in a recurring event series that I can use to consolidate everything and sort by the first date in the series?

    Essentially what I’m wanting is to avoid having to somehow replace the date field on the normal non-recurring events with an ACF repeater field so I can add multiple dates/times to a single event. All I need is an array of dates/times.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

  • Hello,

    Would creating a Single event that spans for 8 weeks won’t work? Is it because there’s a separate ticket per day?

    You could try grouping the Events into Weekly/Monthly also under Events > Settings > Formatting. Here’s a quick screenshot: https://take.ms/vb9b1

    Thread Starter Head Goldfish

    (@shoelaced)

    Yes… so for example the show is 3 hours long and happens on all of those dates. It’s essentially a recurring event but I don’t want to display all instances of the event separately because everything else is exactly the same, and it clutters the event feed.

    I don’t think grouping by week or month would work because I want all dates to be displayed on the event’s single page… also doesn’t the grouping still show all of them, just with headers to show the month name?

    Ideally users would just see something like “Show Name: July 2nd – August 15th” in the list, and then after clicking to view the event single page, see all the dates and times in a list or a dropdown. So if there’s some kind of “get_all_recurrences()” function that would only return the events with the same parent recurring event, maybe I could use that?

    Thread Starter Head Goldfish

    (@shoelaced)

    Hm, I attempted the ACF idea but realized it wouldn’t work anyway, since the events would disappear after the main date had passed.

    It’s also apparent that the recurring events also wouldn’t work, as the events have different times on different days, such as matinee performances, and apparently the recurring events only support the same time for all recurrences.

    I think probably I will have to not use this plugin. Please consider this use case for a future update as I’m sure I’m not the only one who would like to consolidate multiple occurrences of the same event into one listing — definitely not the only theatre/performing company, for whom this kind of event display is very normal.

    Is there a place where you take feature requests? I can add this there.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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