Minimalistic Event Manager

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 maintenance ms-studio.net
• Initial development: Dream Production