Ordering events (not venues) by distance

[Pixelatic]

Another question: how can I sort $events by distance from my centre point?

At the moment when I extend the distance parameter for my $venue_query, so that both my test events are matched, $events is sorted by post ID, not distance. If I set my centre point to Aberdeen, my Edinburgh event is displayed first since it has the lowest post ID.

I’ve tried passing

'orderby' => 'distance',
'order' => 'ASC',

to the $venue_query (inside and outside the proximity array, with no effect) as well as the $events array, again with no effect.

Please feel free to move this to the “General Question” forum as it’s a “How do I” query rather than a bug. Thanks, David.

[Stephen Harris]

Its not currently possible to sort events by distance, just venues. This is because its venues that have the the co-ordinates, not the event. So while it would be possible (with a lot of SQL tinkering), its not natively supported. I’ll consider support for this in 1.5 (the changes I think would too involved to detail there, though it would be possible to implement this feature with code in a utility plug-in / theme, that is, without editing the core plug-in).

[Pixelatic]

Hi Stephen, I have solved this by running a custom WP_Query while iterating through the $venues array returned by eo_get_venues(). For each $venue I’m using tax_query to display events with a matching event-venue term_id like so:

$loop = new WP_Query(array(
  'post_type' => 'event',
  'tax_query' => array(
  'relation' => 'AND',
    array(
      'taxonomy' => 'event-venue',
      'field' => 'id',
      'terms' => $venue->term_id,
    ),
  ),
));

Not optimal I know – if I have 100s of venues I’ll be running a new WP_Query for each, and I can’t see an easy way of implementing paging. I’ll live without that for now. However it does work.

It would be great if you could implement a function (or add-on) which could accomplish this more elegantly.

[Stephen Harris]

Absolutely, I’ll keep you posted on this thread.

[Alex Reynolds]

Has any progress been made on this? I too am looking to sort events by distance (the distance from the venues, anyway).

[Stephen Harris]

Hi Alex,

Sorry, I should have posted an update on this. This is possible, to order events by distance you need to:

• Set orderby to distance
• Provide a valid proximity query in the venue_query attribute:

For example:

$events = new WP_Query( array( 
   'post_type' => 'event',
   'orderby' => 'distance',
   'venue_query' => array(
        'proximity' => array(
            'center' => array( 'lat' => 55.9485588, 'lng' => -3.198519 ),
            'distance' => 10,
            'unit' => 'miles',
            'compare' => '<='
       ),
    ),
    'event_start_after' => 'today'
));

• This reply was modified 10 years, 9 months ago by  Stephen Harris. Reason: Corrected example
• This reply was modified 10 years, 9 months ago by  Stephen Harris. Reason: Corrected example

[Alex Reynolds]

Hi Stephen,

Thanks for getting back to me! Unfortunately, I’m still having a problem sorting events by distance… What I had in my code was already quite similar to what you just posted:

$venue_query = array( 
                            'proximity' => array(
                                'center' => $userloc,
                                'distance' => 100,
                                'unit' => 'km',
                                'compare' => '<='
                           ),
                        );
// The new WP query
$my_queryn = new WP_Query(array( 
                                'post_type' => 'event',
                    'orderby'=> 'distance',
                                'tax_query' => array(
                                    array(
                                        'taxonomy' => 'city',
                                        'field' => 'slug',
                                        'terms' => $cityname,
                                        'operator' => 'IN'
                                    )
                                ),
                                'venue_query' => $venue_query,
                    'event_start_after' => 'midnight',
                    'event_end_after' => $rightnow,
                    'event_end_before' => 'tomorrow 02:00',
                    'posts_per_page' => 200,
                            ));

However, this returns no posts whenever I set orderby to distance. When I remove 'orderby' => 'distance', results do come up. I know that some sort of distance is being handled for sure, as when I change the distance in the venue query, the results change accordingly.

Do you have any insights as to why this would be? I feel like I’m missing something…

[Stephen Harris]

Hi Alex,

It appears there is a bug in that the orderby => distance cannot be used in when using tax_query. This will be fixed in 1.8.0 (the beta of which is due to be released in the next few weeks).

[Alex Reynolds]

Aha you have solved the mystery! Thanks for helping me out! I guess I’ll find a way around taxonomy queries for now.

[Author]

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