Learning Center

Get your feet wet with our events system. Learn the ropes about the various pages that you will use when adding events to your website and how to use the information displayed to you.

IMPORTANT: Some of our older websites are still running an older events management system called “The Events Manager,” and our newer websites are on a system called “The Events Calendar.” One way to check which system you’re on is to log into your dashboard, hover over Events and click on Settings. If you see “Event Settings” at the top, then you are using the new events calendar; and if you see “Event Manager” at the top, then you have the old Events Manager.

For additional Events Calendar tutorials, see https://learning.worshiptimes.org/article-category/plugins/the-events-calendar/. For Events Manager tutorials, see https://learning.worshiptimes.org/article-category/plugins/events-manager/.

This presentation is focused on features available in the newer Events Calendar system. If you like what you see and are interested in upgrading, please don’t hesitate to reach out so we can discuss your options.

This event system called The Events Calendar is on all of our newer websites and networks. You’ll need to become familiar with it if want to add new events to your website.

• Log into your website’s Dashboard.
• In the left-hand admin sidebar, click on Events. This will take you to a page that will display all the upcoming events that you have scheduled and added to your website.
  PRO TIP: If more or less information is being displayed on your event list than what you’d like, go to the very top of your page and click on Screen Options – this will allow you to change what information is being displayed to you by checking and unchecking boxes. We recommend having the Event Categories, Recurring, Start Date, and End Date checked.

Looking at the left-hand admin sidebar, you’ll now see options under Events.

• Add New does exactly what it sounds like – it’s going to allow you to add new events to your website.
• Tags is going to display all the different tags that you have used when creating new events (not mandatory). This can make it really easy to determine which tags are being used and how many events are using that tag.
• Events Categories are similar to Tags, and it will display all the categories that you have used when creating events. Event categories are extremely helpful in organizing your calendar, and we highly recommend using them on every single event that you create. They help to be able to display them in lists and separate events out and categorize them with other related events. Just like Tags, this page will allow you to determine how many events are under one category, allowing you to easily search through different events.
• Locations – each location that you list for events will be saved in the system, meaning you never have to enter a location twice. If you ever need to update a location, or the name of that location, that will be done here on the Locations page. Once locations have been added, locations will display on this page.
• Organizers are very similar to locations. If you ever have a sponsor, host, or organizer for an event, there will be a field when creating that event to place that person or organization’s information such as name, URL for their website, address, phone number and email. All of your organizers are saved so you never have to enter an organizer twice. If an organizer’s information ever needs to be updated, you can do that on this page.
• Import will allow you to quickly import events from different sources, like a Google Calendar. Chances are, however, when we set up your site, we took care of this for you. Though it works great for a one-time import, we do not recommend using the import tool long-term. Issues can occur with recurring events (which are imported as single events) and deleting events from the original source (they are not deleted from your website). These are problems not with the original source calendar or with the events management system, but with the code used by calendars to talk from one entity to another.
• Settings – there are a lot of options here, but you’ll only need to interact with the settings on a very infrequent basis. We have gone through and set up all your settings for you.
• Help – do not use the help page that’s specific to the event system. If you ever have a question or issue, go ahead and submit a support ticket using our Worship Times support center on the back-end of your website or email us at support@worshiptimes.org, and we’ll be happy to take care of any issues that you might be having.