This guide is part of my heavily customised set of how to do things for wordpress I have written for them. the rest are here…

Have just added some info on how to edit the events page to the WP help – its not exactly general, but might be useful as a starting point for the pages where the local pic links to a main pdf etc.

GigPress is a great plugin for WordPress which lets you list your gig online in a word press page, gives a neat widget for the side bar and manages the simple things in life for you automatically. The things I like with it are that as well as the events diary,  it has a table for musicians and a separate table for Venus so if you have gigs at the same venue several times you only need to input the data once.   However  what I really needed was a slightly different solution with all the neat features but using a few different features and with names that related to the dancing group.   SEHSCDS has a website which lists the society events and the events of related societies locally. I had previously done static tables which worked well but needed managing weekly to remove the old information and new locations were hard to add as they always needed map reference looking up and this took time.   What I really wanted was something that the social secretary could edit without my assistance.  You can see the result here

After installing GigPress it comes up with the usual setup things as might be expected. I did all the usual things and inserted the tag into my events page. It worked but was not quite what I wanted. so what did I change?

Manual

Well first I read the GigPress manual. Its only 1 page, but its really useful. Most of what you want to change is there and the exact logic of short code switches and choosing the variables to display is all there.

Categories

As I have three types of event, SEHSCDS dances, SEHSCDS classes and other societies events I wanted to show them separately. The tour feature is great for this.  In the tour window I created a tour for each of the types of event that I wanted. The inserted into the Events page two different tables.

[gigpress_shows scope=upcoming  show_menu=monthly group_artists=no tour=1]

[gigpress_shows scope=upcoming  group_artists=no tour=2]

The first table has a menu pick for showing just one month and once selected it applies to all tales on this page so you don’t need it again in the second line.  I also selected to display the separate tours one in each table as I wanted.

The type of event

When editing the events there is a pull down that allows you to select the age range for the event. These age ranges can be set in the setting page. I did not want this, however I did want to have events of various types, so I deleted the existing line and added a few of my own like this.

|Ball|Day School|Dance Night|Open Night|Christmas Ceilidh|AGM|Other

Note the starting | that was useful as it gives you a blank category first for those times when you dont want to enter anything.   This obviously had the wrong name but more of that later…

Templates

OK this is not a real surprise, I wanted to change the Colum order and to delete a few things, I also wanted to add the addmission rules as a new column called Event. To do this I copied the templates to a new folder and simply used copy and paste. Nothing very exciting in there, except that one needs to be careful about the ordering and format as is made very clear in the author comments.

The meaning of words

The biggest change I wanted to make was to call a venu  a location and shows events.  This seems like a lot of work, but if you look in the lang folder there is a handy list of all the text used in the pages and its the work of moments ( well a couple of hours really ) to go in and create a translation from English to English. so for example in the file gigpress-en_UK.po  I made this edit ( with many others )

#: ../admin/new.php:385
msgid "Add a new venue"
msgstr "Add a new location"

then ran

msgfmt -o gigpress-en_UK.mo gigpress-en_UK.po ; msgfmt -o gigpress-en_US.mo gigpress-en_UK.po

to create a mo file for US and UK english, this means that now the config page offers to create a new location and in my output table the header is Location  and so on.

This all works very well, except for two places. the titles of a couple of columns see to be stuck. To change the header of the artist column and any header reference to the tour, you need to go into settings and edit Artist Label and Tour Label to what you desire.

Using the WordPress translation is well documented and so is GNU gettext although if I was a windows fan I’d probably do the translation there. I was fairly lucky in that I have access to the server and could make a quick change then see what it did.

Searching

These are not well supported, but it says search Unleashed will work – it didn’t for me but Ill try again later

It appears there used to be a button to do this but its now gone so the only option is to edit the theme.

in Atahualpa Theme options go to Style & edit CENTER COLUMN->The LOOP and find the text

<?php bfa_post_headline('<div class="post-headline">','</div>'); ?>

and replace it with

<?php if (!is_page()) {bfa_post_headline('<div class="post-headline">','</div>'); } ?>

I have to confess I found this info on the BFA blog, but it seems useful to have a copy here so I can find it again

I found the solution in a couple of plugins.  The first was the user role editorwhich allows detailed setting of roles for each user. Specifically the ability to edit your own pages.  I combined this with the Enhanced Meta Widget which replaces the standard wordpress widget with one that looks to see what you can do then offers links to those activities. as Admin you simply create a list of the things you want to see and the widget displays the ones that are possible right now.  What I really like is that it does not offer you things that you cant do, so simple users don’t get confused.

I did try a couple of other plugins on the way here, but these two were by far the best of the ones I tried.