Event Description as href title - hover text
A recently added feature to the ical events list or agenda was greater ability to control the information and ”clickability” of the event summary in the widget. In a widget one usually wants to convey a reasonable amount of information while not taking up too much screen space, or looking too busy.
So the upcoming events widget provides the detailed event description as the “title” text for a event link. However sometimes (quite often?) there is no event URL. So this results in a “dummy” url – like a bookmarking url.
Some people were concerned with this, so the following was added:
- the hover icon is changed to a “info” icon
- one can specify a default url (such as a calendar page) for the list type for the widget events, so that if people click on the event in the widget, they go to the default event url. (See below for configuration)
- the dummy bookmark url (when there is no event url) now says “no url available”
Successful Configuration of the Default Event URL for the widget events
The widget has become very popular, however the plugin can also be used in many different ways and allows for many different list types.
- The widget by default uses list type 4. This can of course be changed to to list type 1 and the settings for list type 1 changed accordingly, however since list type 4 is so nicely setup for the widget, maybe go with that.
- The link to calendar in the widget is intended for the widget title link, not as the default event url
- The default event url for the list type is specified in the plugin settings – note that list type 4 is far to the right.
Specify the List Type to use for the Widget
List Type 1
List Type 4
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- Ical widget and events page at Tenbury Ministry
- amr ical calendar events list v2.3.3
- Upcoming Events Widget
Tags: ical
Anmari,
Just got the 2.5.1 version and it definitely fixed the configuration-saving problem.
Still having some issue with the timezone. Our server is on Central time and the website should be on Mountain. I can fixed the events lists in the pages by adding the tz=America/Denver in the [iCal ...] part. For the widget, I can’t seem to get it to change. I tried adding ?tz=America/Denver to the URL, but it didn’t work. Any ideas?
Thanks.
Hi Mike,
I had a quick look. I see the widget thinks it is in Chicago Time and I understand that you have overridden the calendar page to force it into Denver time (It was probably also in Chicago time without that?).
I’d bet a good bottle of wine that your wordpress installation is set to Chicago time, not Denver time. I googled mountain time and zones and can see that at some stage they are both UTC-6 hours. So either your wordpress is ‘old’ and still uses the hours offset for timezone (which never catered for daylight saving) , instead of the new timezone feature (came in in version 2.7 or 2.8), or you have the wrong setting. If old wordpress, then you should either upgrade your wordpress version or install the automatic timezone plugin.
But first logon to your wordpress, admin, goto the settings/ general and check the timezone there (is it -6 offset, chicago or denver?
Area Standard DST Std Abbrev DST Abbrev Zone Name
Eastern Time UTC-5 UTC-4 EST EDT America/New_York
Central Time UTC-6 UTC-5 CST CDT America/Chicago
Mountain Time UTC-7 UTC-6 MST MDT America/Denver
Thanks for taking a look. I am running Wordpress 2.8.4 which I think is the latest. Yes, it is in Chicago time without setting the timezone in the calendar pages. I also have the automatic timezone plugin installed and set to Denver.
Also, If you look at the calendar page with the happenings on it, the big list is missing an event that the widget shows. Not sure about that. I set the cache to 1 and it said it updated less than an hour ago. I will wait another hour to be sure.
The general settings were also set to Denver.
Looks like I lost the bet! – Good news is that thanks to your persistence I found the problem. Was to do with providing shortcode defaults and giving the default php timezone as the default for the shortcode check – should rather have had nothing. Even though the widget does not use the shortcode, it uses the same logic. fixed now in 2.5.2, so if no shortcode data, will stay with whatever it has already figured out – ie wordpress timezone.
Upgrade to 2.5.2 and let me know if that fixes it.
Yep. That worked! Thanks a lot for the quick response.
Oh, I should note, in case anyone wanders this way, that Google is having a glitch with time zones.
I do know there was an update just tonight. I don’t see how it is related, but now all of the times are incorrect on all of our events.
I think it is a Google problem, though; when you check settings, it will not retain the “display all time zones”.
Anyone else?
Thank you for taking the time to answer my question.
It turned out the culprit was the Wordpress theme we were using, which is called Absynthe. Wow! We almost lost the ability to even GET in there, whew.
We installed an entirely different theme and things are working beautifully now.
The slider feature works just fine, by the way and I can know see all of the list types.
Our issue regarding the links at this stage is that I just can’t figure out how to get list type four to pick up on the links that are listed within text in the event.
Now that could be because of the way it is formatted, I’m not sure.
The issue that comes with the whole thing is that List Type 4 makes the best widget (LOOKS GREAT), but we’ve gotten a couple of negative remarks that the event title is not a hot link.
The idea you proposed is great! We had a heck of a time finding any kind of plugin to do what we’re doing. What you’re talking about doing takes things to the next level.
There are lots of ways for people to click on links on these events on our site, and we used a default url that takes them to a post with all of the listings that are in the widget, so this is not a huge deal, it would just be a nice feature.
Thanks again for the great plugin and excellent support!
Hi Anmari,
How are you doing?. And i appreciate your time to create this excellent plug-in for WPMU.
I got the following text when i add this widget. Presently we do not have any events. How will remove the open and closing brackets and i would like to see the text like “No events”.
[iCal:No events.;listtype=4]
Could you plz see this?
Thanks,
Rama
First, thanks for the plugin! Great to see that you’re already supporting 2.8
I’m getting an error with my very simple calendar, so I’m probably misunderstanding how to use it. On my page, I put
[iCal http://www.google.com/calendar/ical/fk08v83em8o60q9bob8em4cnb0@group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics
The URL returns a valid ics file, but the examples all use webcal: instead of http, so I’m probably not using the right format. Can you point me in the right direction for how to integrate a Google calendar?
Thx again,
Tac
Hello!
Thank you for an excellent plug-in! It is really been a God send for us, and was literally the only one to work properly.
I have a couple of questions that are related. Inside the Wordpress dashboard at the AmR settings page, there are only two list types available, List 1 and 2.
Having done a little reading, and a little twiddling, I found that List type 4 suited my needs for the most part for the widget.
The problem I am running into is not being able to access anywhere that I can see the “admin” panel referenced in the instructions to do any tweaking to the other list types. I would like to add a url to List 4 so that each event has a url in it.
I’d appreciate any guidance you can give. I can send a screenshot of what the dashboard looks like inside wordpress if necessary.
Thank you again!
Dear Tea party,
Scroll sideways in the settings option, using bottom scrollbar – they are all there, listed horizontally (because they were so long!).
Some other thoughts:
I have not seen any otherplugin like that around – what do you think?
Works via the test site, although looks like the dashes are not been treated right – some strange characters.
http://anmari.com/testing/wp/?iCal=http://www.google.com/calendar/ical/fk08v83em8o60q9bob8em4cnb0@group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics
Go to the html view of your page and take out any automated “” text that wordpress may have inserted. Ensure that the short code specification is totally clean. only [iCal urltext].
The strange characters maybe caused by an htmnl entities of the dash – like this ? http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=46256, in which case I’ll have to do an update. – look out for an update of the plugin.
Many system try to convert the ics url to a link – we just want it clean – no html.
Re: event hotlink – if there is a EVENT URL in the ics file, then it will become the event title link, making it a hot link. For example, see this page with http://anmari.com/testing/wp/?page_id=261>at test site using a remember the milk ics file
However google does not give one a way to enter the event url, so one would have to use another ical editor or generator generator that does allow one to enter an event URL. I just saw recently that the event manager plugin may generate an ics or ical file – have not tested it yet though.
Hm rama – you need to have an ics (iCal) url or file to work with (It can be empty of events). If you enter anything other than valid URL’s in the widget URL box then you will just get the text you saw along with whatever text you entered. The only way I could reproduce your test was if i typed “No events” where the URL should have been. I don’t understand why you want to use the widget if you do not have an ics file?
The next version about to be released will give ability to specify text to be used if there are no events in the date range.