Seminar talk scheduler

[Rick Gray]

We have weekly seminars on Wednesdays from 4-5PM. I wanted to use event-organizer to make a simple webpage where people could see the dates available (i.e., no talk has been already scheduled for that day), and add their name and the title of their talk. Subsequently, that date would no longer be available. Seeing a currently populated calendar would also be useful here to help them chose a date. I may have bought the Pro version prematurely. I’ve read most of the documentation, and have no idea where to start to accomplish this.

My events have no “end date” or time, and all events start at 4PM, so I don’t need those fields. When I create a new a new form in FES and click on “edit”, I can’t remove anything. I tried editing eo-event-form-event-startend.php to remove the end date and start and end-times, but then that gives me an error.

I’m familiar with PHP and MySQL, and with WordPress, but I usually just use store-bought themes and haven’t done much with altering them. Is there hope for me, or should I just give up on an event-organizer approach? I’m just a simple neurophysiologist, and an adequate programmer, but not this type of programming.

Perhaps someone has a simple version of what I need who could point me in the right direction?

thanks in advance,
rick

[Stephen Harris]

Hi Rick,

Unfortunately Event Organiser requires events have an end date/time. However, this isn’t necessarily a problem, because you can just hide the end date from the templates if required.

That said, the FES form doesn’t allow events to be created without a start or end date/time being specified, which is why you get an error message when you try to remove those fields (presumably that error message was to the effect that an event requires a start/end date) – this too can be worked-around, you just need to tell the plug-in what those date/times should (e.g. the end date-time would be set to 1 hour after the start date-time). You could then remove those fields that you no longer need.

I should point out that the plug-in doesn’t prevent events from occurring at the same/time or place. I’m happy to provide an additional plug-in that introduces that restriction.

So in short, if you’re happy for events to have an end date-time (even if it is not set by the user submitting their seminar) then it seems FES would work for you.

An example of how to force a date/time is a bit involved and I would need to test it, so I’d have to come back to you with the code – so please let me know if you don’t want to use FES!

[Rick Gray]

No, don’t bother. I think I’ll just use a much simpler approach and have people use Doodle to select an open date, then email their title and abstract to the student who runs the seminar series. I had hoped I could customize EventOrganizer in a night, but it’s clear it would be a much larger job than that and not worth my time for a dozen seminars per semester.

But, it looks like this plugin was a lot of work for you, so I don’t mind supporting good programming—it’s just not what I need. Maybe something else will come up where it’ll be the perfect tool.

thanks,
rick

[Author]

Posts