Add custom times to custom re-occurring events

[Tim Ettle]

When creating a custom re-occurrence it would be great to be able to set custom times for each date for example:

14 October 2013 – 8am – 10pm
23 October 2013 7:06 am – 6am – 3pm
25 October 2013 7:06 am – 6am – 5pm
etc

[Stephen Harris]

Will definitely look at this. This probably (if added at all), will be added as separate extension – it would really depend on how well it ‘hides’ itself for those who don’t need it.

I had thought of using the occurrence picker to allow specific times to be selected (e.g. clicking a date reveals times for the day which you can add or remove). However, that removes the ability to remove the date with one click. There also other complications such as the ticket admin and booking form, where currently you can unambiguously select an occurrence of the event via a datepicker. I don’t think they are insurmountable problems, but they do present major challenges (particularly so for the ticket admin where space is a premium).

But if it can be done well, I’d very much like to this available in some form or another.

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(For the benefit of others there’s a related discussion here: http://wp-event-organiser.com/forums/topic/event-custom-reoccurrence-in-different-starttimes/ ).

• This reply was modified 10 years, 6 months ago by  Stephen Harris.

[Tim Ettle]

Sounds great! That would work perfectly, I guess a check box for custom times (under dates) that reveals the start and end time fields (if required) would work (would still allow one click toggle of dates). But yeah I hadn’t thought about the ticketing issues… Is there any documentation on creating plugins for this as we won’t be using tickets for this project so it would be good for us to add the times option in a non destructive way.

Cheers

[Brent Barkley]

I second for this being really helpful.

This came up today in the site I’m building–my client has classes that have custom re-occurring events, but each one is at a different time. I thought I was covered by the custom re-occurring option, but didn’t see until today that it doesn’t allow a new start/end time for each one!

Anyhow, Stephen–I know you have a million requests and support items to handle. Just seconding a need for this! 🙂

[Alex Reynolds]

Thirded!

Has any progress been made on this, Stephen? My client is really pushing for this functionality, so I’m going to take a crack at modifying the plugin, but I’m quite inexperienced with these things so I figured I’d check in and see if there’s anything more in the works…

[Stephen Harris]

Hi Alex,

There has been some (limited) progress in this area. I’ve been looking at making it easier to edit events from the admin calendar. Specifically the ability to drag and drop events. In day view this allows you to alter the time.

However, while that part is now functioning – editing an event from the event admin screen will ‘undo’ the time changes. Additionally there are edge cases which cause problems if an event has multiple occurrences on the same day. Lastly, this hasn’t been tested with Pro, and may cause problems if using the datepicker for date selection on the booking form.

As such it’s nowhere near public release. However, if you check the GitHub repo in the next few days, specifically the “timeedit” branch (which doesn’t exist yet). I’ll be pushing changes there, you’re more than welcome to take a look at the changes, and you’re also welcome to submit a PR if there are any changes you think could be made.

[Stephen Harris]

Update: Here’s a link to the development branch for allowing individual occurrences to have differing start times. Durations are still fixed at this point: https://github.com/stephenharris/Event-Organiser/tree/edittime

[guthriesplace]

Would it make sense to setup occurrences as its own custom post type, with the post_parent set to the event (similar to attachments)?

I’m working on building out a website for a movie theater, and didn’t realize this wasn’t an out-of-the-box feature until it was time to launch – in the case of a movie theater, there can be multiple showings for the same movie on the same day, possibly repeated at different times on different days.

I’m about to start coding an extension to work it this way, but could use some feedback on the idea…

[Stephen Harris]

Hi guthriesplace,

That option has been considered. The reason for avoiding it is that, with arbitrary recurring events, you potentially pollute the posts table with a lot of occurrences. That said, if you’re were able to build an extension which uses this method, but (as it undoubtedly will) requires only a few changes to the core plug-in files, I’d be happy to try and provide additional hooks to make changing the core files unnecessary.

For the time being there are plans to allow event occurrences to vary in time (see this branch) via the admin calendar. It is still experimental though. The focus is currently on allowing different times but still enforcing one occurrence per day. Once that’s achieved, the focus will shift to allowing multiple occurrences on day. This may require a rethink on how the current add/remove date works (which currently only allows “whole” dates to be added/removed and the default date-picker for bookings.

[guthriesplace]

Hi Stephen,

Thanks for the quick reply – I’ll let you know if/when I’m able to get this working. My goal is to just hook into the eo_update_event method for saving the data, and avoid making any changes to the core plugin files.

Thanks again!

[Rolands Rudītis]

I am also waiting for this feature as top priority for my site!

[Rachel Druskin]

this feature could really be useful in my site too!!!

[Stephen Harris]

Hi all,

Just an update – although the development branch hasn’t seen much action recently, the plan is to release this feature as “beta” in January. What this means is that you’ll be able to edit the time of each occurrence (via the admin calendar) but only if you enable it via your wp-config.php. I’ll confirm this nearer the time, but something like:

define( 'EVENT_ORGANISER_BETA_FEATURE', true );

The feature will be subject to some restrictions as outlined above.

The purpose of releasing it as a “beta feature” is so those who need it (and it’s reasonably high demand) can start using it (and hopefully I’ll get some feedback on it) while those who don’t need it are unaffected.

I’ll post an update nearer the time and link to it here.

[B+eo]

I’d really like to try out setting different times for the occurrences of an event. I activated the “EVENT_ORGANISER_BETA_FEATURE with the current event-organiser plugin (version 2.12.4), but I can’t change the times in the admin calendar.

Do I have to check out the edittime branch? Or how can I test this out?

And is this pre-feature of setting different times for the occurrences compatible with the event-organiser-pro -plugin?

[Stephen Harris]

It should be EVENT_ORGANISER_BETA_FEATURES (with an S 😉 ).

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