Minimalistic Event Manager Plugin

This plugin (MEM or Minimalistic Event Manager) is intended for theme authors and developers who want a simple, robust and flexible solution for managing event dates.

The MEM plugin offers a clean interface that allows to add event dates (start dates, end dates, repeating dates) to posts (and to any custom post type).

The main features

• Event dates can be attached to any post type: Posts, Pages, Custom Post Types… (optionally, they can be restricted to specific content types).
• Event dates can be of three types: start dates, end dates, repeating dates.
• There is no mandatory date format: Time, Day, and Month are optional. An event date could be “January 2046”, or just “2046”.

What the plugin doesn’t do

The MEM plugin works as a simple interface for entering those dates into custom fields, but it won’t do much on the public side of your theme (there’s a simple widget for displaying a list of events).

The plugin was created primarily to enable theme developers to create their own display of events on the front-end.

If you aren’t sure how to achieve this, our wiki will provide a collection of examples to get you started.

Technical implementation

Technically, the MEM plugin stores the dates as ordinary Custom Fields, in a machine-readable format (such as “2016-11-23 13:37”). This gives you absolute freedom for displaying your events in your theme:

• You can query for specific date ranges by using the meta_key / meta_compare parameters.
• You can use the php date function to display the date in any possible manner (or date_i18n for proper localization).

Plugin options

The plugin has two settings that can be modified with a few lines in your functions.php file:

• You can limit it to specific post types.
• You can use an “alpha” mode, which gives you a blank input field for each date. This can be useful if you need to enter dates that don’t fit the predefined format.

See the online documentation for the full instructions.

Links

Documentation

Credits

• Concept and maintenancems-studio.net
• Initial development: Dream Production

1. Upload the plugin to your plugins directory
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress

For more detailed instructions, see Installing Plugins.

After activating the plugin, refer to the wiki for further instructions.

1. 

   The initial state, no dates are set yet.

2. 

   The start date is being entered.

3. 

   An event with start date, repeating twice.

Installation Instructions

1. Upload the plugin to your plugins directory
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress

For more detailed instructions, see Installing Plugins.

After activating the plugin, refer to the wiki for further instructions.

There are hundreds of plugins doing exactly this — why a new one?

All the date management plugins we tested are more complicated than needed. We tried many of them. We believe that our concept is more simple, more robust and more flexible. 🙂

Is the plugin localized?

Yes it is! For now, it supports English, French and German. Since the interface uses about 4 words, it’s not much work to translate it for other languages.

Can I find you on GitHub?

Of course, here: https://github.com/ms-studio/minimalistic-event-manager/

1.1.1

• Fixing plugin textdomain
• updating german translation

1.1.0

• version bump (WP compatibility)

1.0.9

• widget improvement: added filter (mem_event_date_display) that allows to customize the widget date format.

1.0.8

• widget bugfix: when number of upcoming events is greater than display limit, events in the near future should be displayed first.
• removed useless html tag in widget output, thanks to @macemmek
• fixed warning message, thanks to @danhollywells

1.0.7

• do not load the widget code if PHP is lower than 5.3, to avoid white screen of death.

1.0.6

• version bump (fixing an issue in 1.0.5 where the funtions directory wasn’t included).

1.0.5

• adding a widget to display a list of events on the frontend.
• adding a function that facilitates custom display of event information.

1.0.4

• adapting to post-MP6 dashboard design
• removing 32-characters limitation when using “alpha” mode
• adding some date format translation strings, useful when using the mem-extras

1.0.3

• uses the icon font of MP6 if available

1.0.2

• improves css to adhere to MP6
• fixes a php error visible in debug mode
• fixes a js error, props to @Dan2k3k4

1.0.1

• fixes activation error on some older php versions

1.0

• initial public release