Hide expired events in calendar

[Anonymous]

When displaying the calendar using the [eme_calendar] shortcode, it currently lists all events for the given month, even if they’re expired. Is there a reason that it shows old events? In my opinion, if an event is past and bookings are no longer allowed, they shouldn’t be on the calendar.

[Franky]

The reason is because it is a calendar, not just a list of future events. Using the filter eme_event_list_filter you can filter out the old events if you don’t want to show them on the page where you use the calendar.

[Anonymous]

I’m sorry, but showing old events “because it is a calendar” doesn’t make sense, at least to me. The way I understand it, the purpose of the EME calendar is to display events for which users can register. If an event doesn’t allow registration — because it’s fully booked, or because it’s expired — what benefit does it give the user to see that event? If an expired event is selected, all it’s going to do is tell the user that they can’t register. Sure, they can see what the event was all about, its location, etc, but if they can’t book seats, none of that info benefits them. If there is no benefit, why include it in the calendar?

To give a specific example, here’s a calendar that I’ve implemented for a site I’m managing:

http://brokenbowranch.net/trail-ride-calendar/

Trail rides are available three times a day, Monday through Saturday. Using the “because it is a calendar” logic, the missing events on some dates should be displayed anyway, even though nobody can book additional spaces for them. However, you’ve provided a switch (in the RSVP settings) to hide events that are fully booked. This switch makes a lot of sense, as it doesn’t benefit the user to see info about an event they can’t join. Because users also cannot join expired events, why not implement an automatic filter to hide them?

As for using the manual filter that you suggested, the documentation isn’t clear on exactly how to use this filter in a specific situation, like affecting the display of a calendar. How do I specify that the filter only affects the calendar, and not anything else that might trigger the filter? Is that filter triggered by any of the features in the EME admin tools?

[Franky]

First of all, this change should help you: http://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/932646
Second of all, I’ll explain my point of view on a calendar: check outlook or google cal, it shows past events too (but the new option can change this now)
Third: you can use a conditional tag to hide the whole registration part if the RSVP period has ended, check #_IS_RSVP_ENDED in the doc: http://www.e-dynamics.be/wordpress/?cat=24
And last: your registration form seems to be using the captcha, but the image is not showing. Could it be that php-gd is not installed?

[Franky]

And I just figured out that it was already possible for events which RSVP period has ended: using [eme_if] in the calendar format with the #_IS_RSVP_ENDED conditional tag, you could control all this too.

[Franky]

Just found a small error in my last code, fixed with this: http://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/932722

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the update. While I see your point regarding Google or Outlook calendars, those are personal calendars, and in many cases, users of those calendars do want to see past events. I consider EME’s calendar to be a special-purpose calendar, and would argue that because one of its primary purposes is to display events for which users can book seats, it’s illogical to keep events on that calendar that can’t be booked. Because listing such events provides no benefit to the user, it does nothing more than add visual clutter.

I hadn’t considered the conditional tag before. I might go that route, though I’ll wait to see what your update brings. (And by the way, conditional tags are just plain awesome! They’ve proved to be quite useful in numerous situations.)

As for the captcha issue, that’s a recurring problem I’ve been having with the site. The guy who runs the site’s hosting server just pointed out the problem to me. Whenever I re-install the EME plug-in, the plug-in folders get re-created, and their permissions get reset. Those default permission settings don’t play nicely with what php-gd expects as it generates the captcha images for EME. So every time I update EME, I need to manually fix all of those permissions. I’m probably going to write a custom script to do the job.

[Franky]

Glad to hear conditional tags are of use 🙂
I also added a new option to hide evernts which rsvp period has ended.

[Anonymous]

Thank you very much for including an option to hide old events on the calendar (and only there!).
It was a feature I’m waiting for since months… 🙂

And for the conditional tags: Yes, I use them also 🙂

[Author]

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