est.3.22 » Wordpress (Multi-Day) Events List

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Wordpress (Multi-Day) Events List

February 10, 2010

2 Comments

I have been doing a lot of searching on how to get an events list. Simple concept right and there should be a plugin right? Well, there are plenty of plug-ins. But due to the age of the tech on the host server, I was having a lot of trouble because the client’s host is still on PHP 4.# and mySQL 4.#… hey, it’s old!

Requirements:

Event can span more than one day.
Sort (3) events by those soonest to today’s date.
If there are more than 3 events, show a link to View All Events
Show mulit-day events – sort the list if the end date is before today’s date.
Sort multi-day events by those soonest to today’s date, but if the start date has already past, still sort by that date or begin date.
If the start and end year is the same, only display the year in the end date.
If the start and end month is the same, only display month in the end date.
List goes in sidebar.php

Simple Solution (still took a lot of hours to resolve):

Create a category with slug “events” (used for archive) and (maybe or) change the “WHERE $wpdb->term_taxonomy.term_id = 9″ numeric value to your category(cateogries – yes even multiple).
Create a post and add it to the events category.
Create a custom field labeled “start_date” with a format of YYYY/MM/DD.
Create a custom field labeled “end_date” with a format of YYYY/MM/DD.
Both fields required even if only a single day event.
Use a double meta_key post query.
LIMIT 4 in the mySQL query limits the results to 4 (change to your number or remove) – view the Wordpress query values in the codex.

Code:


<!--p
  $today = date("Y/m/d");
  $querystr = "
  SELECT * FROM $wpdb->posts
  LEFT JOIN $wpdb->postmeta AS endDate ON(
  $wpdb->posts.ID = endDate.post_id
  AND endDate.meta_key = 'end_date'
  )
  LEFT JOIN $wpdb->postmeta AS startDate ON(
  $wpdb->posts.ID = startDate.post_id
  AND startDate.meta_key = 'start_date'
  )
  LEFT JOIN $wpdb->term_relationships ON($wpdb->posts.ID = $wpdb->term_relationships.object_id)
  LEFT JOIN $wpdb->term_taxonomy ON($wpdb->term_relationships.term_taxonomy_id = $wpdb->term_taxonomy.term_taxonomy_id)
  WHERE $wpdb->term_taxonomy.term_id = 9
  AND $wpdb->term_taxonomy.taxonomy = 'category'
  AND $wpdb->posts.post_status = 'publish'
  AND endDate.meta_value >= $today
  ORDER BY startDate.meta_value, startDate.meta_value ASC
  LIMIT 4
  ";

  $eventPosts = $wpd-->get_results($querystr, OBJECT);

?&gt;

<!--p $eventCount=0; if ($eventPosts) :-->
<!--p foreach ($eventPosts as $post):-->
<!--p setup_postdata($post);-->

<!--p if ($eventCount<3) :-->
  <!--p
  if(get_post_meta($pos-->ID, 'end_date', true)) {
    $event_end_date = get_post_meta($post-&gt;ID, 'end_date', true);
    $endDate = date("j F Y", strtotime($event_end_date));
    $displayEndDate = date("j F", strtotime($event_end_date));
    $endYear = date("Y", strtotime($event_end_date));
    $endMonth = date("F", strtotime($event_end_date));
  } else {
    $endDate = $startDate;
  }

  if(get_post_meta($post-&gt;ID, 'start_date', true)) {
    $event_start_date = get_post_meta($post-&gt;ID, 'start_date', true);
    $startDate = date("j F Y", strtotime($event_start_date));
    $displayStartDate = date("j F", strtotime($event_start_date));
    $startYear = date("Y", strtotime($event_start_date));
    $startMonth = date("F", strtotime($event_start_date));
  } else {
    $startDate = $endDate;
  }
?&gt;
        <li><a title="&lt;?php the_title_attribute(); ?&gt;" rel="bookmark" href="http://www.est322.com/wp-admin/%3C?php the_permalink(); ?&gt;"><span class="date">
<!--p
  if( $endDate!=$startDate) {
    if( $endYear==$startYear ){
      if ( $endMonth==$startMonth){
        $displayStartDateAlt = date("j", strtotime($event_start_date))." - ";
        echo $displayStartDateAlt;
      } else {
        $displayStartDateAlt = date("j F", strtotime($event_start_date))." - ";
        echo $displayStartDateAlt;
      }
    } else {
      echo $displayStartDate." - ";
    }
  }
   echo $displayEndDate;
?>
</span>
</a></li>
        <li>No Upcoming Events</li>
» </span></a><a href="http://www.est322.com/wp-admin/%3C?php echo get_option('siteurl'); ?&gt;/category/events/">View All Upcoming Events</a>

<!--p endif;-->

I will follow up with another post which I leverage the same query for my archive.php and just include a simple is_category() to run the code above for those posts in the Events category only.

I am sure this could be simplified, especially all the break-down of the date values into year month evaluations.

Also if you read above, you know it works for php4.+! Hoorah! (Stupid old host server technology.)

2 comments so far.

Logan said on February 11, 2010 at 2:53 am

Wat.

whoisfelix said on February 15, 2010 at 7:30 pm

Haha! I don’t understand the means but I agree that there should be mo-fresher calendars on Wordpress. I’m admittedly jealous of your coding skills.