What's new in Elevent

Improvements and new features galore. Well…it's not that big of an update, so semi-galore.

• Updated the default Event List template to sort chronologically out of the box.
• Added some sample code to the Event List template to show how to filter it to show events from specific festival/season/series. Uncomment it to use it.

To take advantage of these 2 changes, re-import the FacetWP Event List Template from the Plugin Installation Guide

• Fixed a bug where taxonomies/categories wouldn't always update with auto-sync
• Added an option to automatically show a date range for events on an event grid when there are showtimes on more than 3 dates--using the new [elevent_promo_event_date] shortcode
• On the main ticketing shortcode, [elevent_showtime_list], in the default tabbed view, if a showtime spans multiple days, instead of showing a start date and time, the tabs will show a date range. This is handy for multi-day events.
• Remove the 2-digit year from the [elevent_showtime_list] tabs in the default view; now only month and day show.
• Fixed a bug that threw warnings on plugin installation (rogue leading space characters in 2 files)
• Added some CSS classes to enable easier and more effective styling and control on the event calendar and legend. Now you can customize the colors for the legend values and the background color they display on the calendar. (e.g., class "key out" for the sold out color)
• Updated the language in the calendar legend to more accurately describe what each state means.

• Fixed it so the Buy Tickets button on a sub-event will still display on child events when they are the only child event associated with a parent event.
• Added the ability to rename the header of the Showtimes List block (the main ticketing block) to the Elementor "Elevent Showtimes" Block
• Added support to import over 50 showtimes for a single event
• Fixed a behavior where updates to the festival/season/series taxonomy appeared to save but did not actually save. Updating the custom fields ACF file is required to receive this fix.

Introducing the initial set of Elevent Elementor blocks - drag, drop, & configurable blocks you can include on page and post templates, headers, and footers.

Just search for "Elevent" in the Elementor block panel and see what's available (A lot more show up on those event-specific post templates)

Want to add a whole mini-menu for all Elevent account login and customer account management? Just drag that block into your site header. Done.

Blocks are great--not only are they easier than shortcodes to find and add, they offer more customization on each page or post for custom text or style tweaks. Stay tuned for more like this.

Not an Elementor user? That's okay--we have a matching library of Gutenberg blocks in the works. You'll already see a few have started to trickle in.

Also in this update:

• Some base CSS changes to make styling easier and nicer out of the box
• Event grid shortcode now has an option for having the results be listed separated by commas, or as a date range assuming 4+ dates.
• Changed the way some date labels get marked up so they are more styleable
• Added the elevent_promo_event_date shortcode. When added to a listing, grid, or loop of events (e.g. Event Grid), it will show the comma-separated date(s) when the events take place. It will automatically flex to a date range when there are more than 3 dates for a single event.
• Bug fixes

Introducing the ability to enable the plugin to sync new and updated events from Elevent automatically. If you enable auto-sync, you won't need to log into WordPress at all to have events update themselves on your website.

But first: We messed up!

You may notice some error messages when trying to update the Elevent for WordPress plugin from the WordPress plugins screen. We accidentally let a security token expire--we're sorry about that.

Just this once, to update the Elevent for WordPress plugin, please do the following:

1. Delete the prior version of the Elevent plugin
2. Upload and activate version 0.6 from the .zip file here. As always, back up your site before doing so, but this was tested extensively and shouldn't be a problem.

Thanks!

• Auto-sync is ready to use. By Enabling Auto-sync on the Elevent Settings page, events and showtimes will sync up from Elevent hourly without user intervention

• Removed the dependency on the CPT UI 3rd party plugin. After this update, you can deactivate and delete CPT UI unless you are using it for other purposes
• Greatly simplified the installation and plugin updating process--no more importing for elevent events, taxonomies, or fields.
• When a user applies the filter on the calendar view, they will no longer be bumped up to the top of the page.
• Made the default colors for showtime status on the calendar view a little easier to see without negatively affecting visual contrast.
• Stopped a chatty message from writing to the PHP error logs frequently.
• Shortened and renamed the key for the festival/season/series taxonomy. We're starting to migrate that category to align with brands in Elevent proper.

The newest version features a wide-sweeping cleanup of CSS styling throughout the plugin, improved SEO, and a fix for multi-part events that have only a single sub-event.

• New Feature (Beta): Enable Autosync. When enabled, will automatically sync up the website with new and updated Elevent Events and Showtimes from Elevent every hour. Please do not enable, yet, on production sites.
• Significant styling improvements to the base styles of the plugin to improve the look & feel of Elevent widgets out of the box
• Made half a dozen enhancements to events for SEO (search engine optimization) and rich search engine results listings for ticketable events.
• Fixed a bug where local, non-Elevent code was allowed to re-adjust for time zones, causing confusion over which day of the week displays and when an event is considered a past event.
• Added a setting to multi-part events to identify which event is the parent event, where tickets are sold. This setting is required when there is a multi-part event that only consists of a single sub-event.

• Truncated the year value on the display of dates when added to event grids and lists
• Truncated the year value on the display of dates on the date tabs of the [elevent-showtime-list] shortcode

The newest version of the WordPress plugin contains some major updates to how events sort and display along with some valuable bug fixes.

Before Updating

Important: The changes made to event dates and sorting by date require some manual intervention.

1. Before updating the plugin, you should go to Elevent Events -> Event Dates. Delete any event dates for today and any dates in the future. Or just delete them all. When you re-sync the Elevent plug-in, all of your Elevent Events will have correct dates automatically re-assigned.
2. Update the ACF custom fields for the Elevent plugin. You can retrieve the latest file here and re-import custom fields using the ACF import tool.

• Introduced the ability to sort an event list or grid in psuedo-chronological order. You now have the option to sort by a new field on Elevent Events: Next Earliest Event Date.
  • To enable chronological sorting, update your sort filter in FacetWP to sort by "next_earliest_event_date"

• Added support for child venues--this enables you to designate multiple auditoriums or rooms as all part of a single venue location and list all showtimes by that parent venue. Enable Merge Child Venues on the plugin settings page.

Visitors will see showtimes for the whole site.

When venues have a parent venue

• Created a better mobile-responsive variation of the Day Schedule calendar view for smartphones
• Switched the description that displays on the [multi_part_event] shortcode to the new description field (instead of post excerpt)
• Fixed a bug related to FacetWP causing regular blog posts to sort differently without using a 3rd party sorting plugin; in so doing, we removed a feature that would omit a leading "A" or "The" in event titles when sorting by event name. We will re-introduce that feature soon.
• Fixed it so you will no longer see a warning on plugin activation -- "unexpected output…"
• Fixed the display so you will no longer see flickering when hovering over a datepicker date selected from the View More option (dates far in the future)
• Fixed a bug causing issues when events had the same date as prior years

In WordPress v0.5.11, we introduce a new plugin setting to help demystify when and how templates are applied to single event landing pages.

When using a page builder like Elementor, there tends to be a bit of a tug of war between WordPress itself and the templates applied by the page builder. For Elevent Events, we let you explicitly check off whether WordPress templates or a page builder's templates should rule the day.

If this checkbox is checked, the default WordPress templates that come with the plugin will take priority. You can copy, modify, and paste your own custom versions into your theme.

While checked, page builder templates (e.g. Elementor) will take precedence.

Several versions of the WordPress plugin have been released--let's get caught up.

Restructured the CSS styling for cleaner customization

For a cleaner, easier time designing every aspect of the plugin to look sharp and consistent, we took a major pass through the entire plugin to make CSS styling optimal.

We did extensive testing to minimize any unexpected changes that might occur from any customization you have already done, but backup before updating and do a review just in case.

Also new & improved:

• Revised it so user-friendly text (instead of the slugs) displays in the filter dropdown in calendar views
• Added the ability to specify in-person, live-stream, and/or virtual showtime types in the elevent_calendar_view shortcode. This introduces the ability to display virtual, on-demand streaming windows as date ranges in the event calendar views.
• New taxonomies will now have a default color. So color-coding on the event calendar will not require additional color picking unless you want to change colors
• Added some default styling to enforce a min-width on the ticket quantity selector. This was done to protect ticket widgets from not showing the numeral on smaller mobile devices on some websites
• Changed the default color of navbar widgets to show on light backgrounds--the more common default
• Fixed a bug causing event search results not to display due to exceptional leading "A" and "The" sorting

WordPress Plugin v0.5.4 is out.

There's a new view in town--the simple yet effective List of Shows now displays alongside all of the calendar views.

Grouped by day, the List of Shows displays each showtime in chronological order in the simplest, easiest-to-digest way we could imagine. It can also be filtered by a category of your choice. You don't need to do anything but update to make this option available.

Also new:

• Added an option to the [elevent-calendar-view] shortcode to pre-filter event calendars to include only events in a specific festival/season/series taxonomy
• Added a new setting in Elevent settings to define a Default Timezone independent of the WordPress timezone. The Default Timezone will apply to Elevent Events automatically but can be overridden on specific events.
• Added support to specify a landing view on the new event calendar views to first land the user on month, week, day schedule, or showtime list view. Appending a querystring parameter to the ./calendar-view/ link accomplishes this--e.g., https://yoursite.com/calendar-view/?view=list
• Improved the sorting by title to exclude sorting event titles by a leading "A" or "The"
• Returning shortcodes as strings, not echoed, as a best practice
• Removed the chattiness in console.logs and console.debugs
• Removed some calls to demo functions to clean things up a bit

Introducing the hotly anticipated new Calendar views into the plugin.

These are slick new options to display your calendar of events in monthly, weekly, and day schedule densities to complement your other views. It's great for runs of shows, off-season light programming, regular weekly programming, festivals--it's hard to come up with a scenario where you won't want them available.

Events are color-coded and filterable in-calendar by a category you choose. The background color will communicate ticket availability according to the legend underneath. And it's super fast.

Users can flip between a whole month of events…

…one week at a time…

…or one day at a time, seeing in time what's playing at each venue--that's the first image there at the top.

It's also, if I do say so myself, the best darn designed calendar you're gonna find out there, on full-sized screens or on mobile.

Also in this release:

• Added icons and mobile responsiveness to the new event view navigation shortcode (e.g., the "pill")
• Fixed a bug that could result in the current day disappearing from the [elevent_dates] shortcode before midnight local time
• Cleaned up some styles, freeing up the ability to customize the look & feel more without running into !important CSS overrides.
• Fixed a bug that allowed the datepicker to bust out of its container when there were a lot of dates

• Created new shortcode for View/Schedule/Calendar "Pill" navigation. Add [elevent_event_nav paths="" names="" icons=""] to any regular WordPress page to create a custom navigation that displays the names, and links to each view of your events you wish to offer. As a shortcode, offers the ability to have multiple, different view switcher navs on different parts of your site.

• Replaced the Sponsor Images gallery with a custom shortcode: [elevent_sponsors]. The new shortcode enables assigning custom links to each sponsor's own website, so when the user clicks a sponsor's image, they are directed to that sponsor's landing page.

• Added ability to choose the taxonomy the new event calendar will be color-coded and filtered by. This is set as the "Calendar Taxonomy" on the Elevent settings page in WordPress.
• Hid Virtual events on calendar views--too much clutter
• Created mobile-friend view variations for monthly and weekly calendar views. Views will be responsive automatically, no changes needed

Important: To take advantage of the changes to the sponsor image gallery, this update requires updates to Custom Fields and changes to any custom single-event-page templates the site currently uses. Back up your site before completing this update.

1. To update Custom Fields, re-import Custom Fields into ACF from the updated file found in the Docs. If you have made any customizations to Custom Fields on Elevent Events or Elevent Showtimes, this re-import will wipe out those customizations. You have the option to re-apply your customizations or contact us via support--we'll tell you which manual changes to make to custom fields.
2. To update single-event custom templates, add the [elevent_sponsors] shortcode to your Elementor or WordPress template(s) in your child theme so it will display.