Category: Tutorial

If you use the events template feature of RSVPMaker to create multiple events including the same boilerplate details that repeat every time, now you can also create automated reminder messages for each of those events more easily.

When you create a series of events based on a template, each event gets a copy of the basic content (where and when you meet, who to contact with questions) and most of the associated metadata (like whether RSVPs are being collected, whether there is a fee, what event type the post is associated with). However, the reminder message setup isn’t duplicated by default — and you might not necessarily want the reminder message to be the same each time. Just like you do not want to automatically overwrite the content of posts that might have been updated independently of the template.

On the other hand, you may want the reminder message to be the same (or basically the same) most of the time. Improving how this is handled is one of those features I needed for my own purposes. Since I run an Online Toastmasters club (Online Presenters) that meets every week, and every one of those meetings needs an automated reminder message to the people who signed up to attend as a guest. The reminder includes details like the online meeting link and basic instructions for how to sign in. Adding those reminders one meeting at a time was a drag.

Now, when you update a reminder message for any event associated with a template, you will see an option to apply that update to all the other events associated with that template. This is similar to the process for updating events based on a template, where you can click “Check all” but still make exceptions for special events that require a slightly different message.

Note that the subject line includes a series of date formatting codes, which default to the same ones used in your site’s “long date” format from the RSVPMaker settings page. You may want to tweak it, for example if you do not think it’s necessary for the year to be displayed.

The result looks like this

For basics on how the reminders function works, see this post.

RSVPMaker users have periodically requested that I add a standard way of recording event locations. If you were organizing a series of events at a specific location, you could create an event template, but RSVPMaker didn’t have a way of managing locations independently of events. Now it does.

One reason I hesitated was I didn’t want to provide a template that would lock you into a specific presentation, without taking into account individual preferences for which mapping service to use or how events should be presented to your audience.

My solution is to provide a default format but let you edit it however you want, using the WordPress editor. Details like whether you want the location to appear at the top of the post, the bottom of the post, or in the middle are left up to you. I’m shooting for a little more consistency, but no foolish consistencies.

Click the Location button in the event editor, and you will get a form that lets you add a new location. Give it a name and put in the address details. You can manually add a map link or let the software generate a Google Maps link (be sure to test it afterward to make sure it guides people to the right address).

When you click Add, the formatted address will be inserted into your event post. It will also be saved as a special kind of RSVPMaker post. The next time you want to add that address, you will be able to pick it from the dropdown list and click Choose.

You can change or enhance the content of one of these saved locations using the WordPress editor. For example, you might want to add a location photo to point out a hard-to-find entrance.

Locations are listed under RSVP Events when you have it set to Show All (rather than sorted to show only future events). The Edit button shown in the dialog above will also guide you to the correct post.

Here’s an example of retrieving that sample location to add it to an event post.

If you want to provide any special styling for the display of locations, there are several class tags you can take advantage of:

<span class="rsvplocation"><span class="locname">The Pride Center at Equality Park</span>
<span class="locaddress">2040 N. Dixie Highway</span>
<span class="citystatezip"><span class="loccity">Wilton Manors</span>, <span class="state">FL</span> <span class="postal">33305</span> <a class="map" href="https://www.google.com/maps/search/?api=1&amp;query=2040%20N.%20Dixie%20Highway%20Wilton%20Manors%2C%20FL%2033305" target="_blank" rel="noopener">(Map)</a></span></span>

Here’s an example of a little CSS I experimented with using the WordPress Customizer tool

.rsvplocation {
display: block; 
background-color: #ddd;
padding: 10px;}
.locname {font-weight: bold;}

… which results in this:

Outdated websites are the worst. Particularly when it’s obvious. When you view the home page and it’s advertising an “upcoming” event that happened a week or a month ago. Or urging you to take advantage of a limited time offer for which the deadline is already past.

Is that really the worst thing a website could be? Nah, I suppose it could be ugly or disorganized or unprofessional in a lot of different ways. But it’s one of the things I see regularly on websites that are otherwise very polished. The big event, or the date of the big promotion, has come and gone, but no one has gone back to refresh the website. If it goes on for a few days, it’s forgivable: we all have lots of other things to do. Pretty quickly, though, it starts to look like a sign of neglect.

Here’s the thing: computers can tell time. Content management systems can be configured to let outdated content expire or fade into the background. Just by using a blog and posting to it regularly, you can display your latest content more prominently than older content. For people to be able to find your original announcement of an event in the blog archives isn’t a bad thing, as long as there is more recent content (photos of happy people in the event recap) piled on top.

RSVPMaker event listings address this in a different way, allowing you to display a calendar of events in order of event dates as opposed to in order of posting date (blog style). Site visitors can navigate back through the calendar to find old event posts, but the upcoming stuff is always displayed more prominently.

When you want to embed a featured event on the home page, you can set that up using the rsvpmaker_one shortcode and specify that it should expire after the date is past. I also provide an rsvpmaker_timed shortcode that you can wrap around any block of content with start and/or end times specified for when it should be displayed. (Both are not new but have been improved in recent releases).

The rsvpmaker_one shortcode

The rsvpmaker_one shortcode is particularly intended as a way of displaying an event on the home page or a landing page. Use it to display a specific event, or the next scheduled event, or the next event in a specific category (like the next webinar). You can display the full event, with either the RSVP Now! button or the registration form included, or a show compact version. You can also extract elements like the date, the button, or the form to be used in a custom layout. In the context of this post, the important thing is that it can be set to expire (disappear off the page) when the event date is past.

There is a button on the button bar (the clock icon) to help you get the parameters right.

Examples of the shortcode:

Retrieve a specific event by ID and display it along with the registration form. Expire it 6 hours after the start time of the event.

Show the next event in the webinar category (if none is scheduled, don’t show anything). Instead of displaying the whole form, show the RSVP Now! button.

You can also add a style attribute where you specify CSS for a div to be wrapped around the featured event. Example: style=”border: thin dotted #222; padding: 10px;” for a dotted border.

The rsvpmaker_timed shortcode

The rsvpmaker_timed shortcode is a quick-and-dirty way of specifying a start and/or end date for displaying a chunk of content. I’m sure there are other plugins or themes that provide something like this as a feature, but consider this a little something extra you get “for free” with RSVPMaker.

Here’s an example of how you would set it up:

The basic usage is like this:

Alternatively, you can do this:

The output is similar to what you would get from the example shown above (the one with the closing [/rsvpmaker_timed] tag), except that we’re pulling the content from another post. The style attribute is also available with this one, if you would like to apply a border or background color to the featured chunk of content.

If you don’t specify time of day, midnight is assumed (a December 26 end time means the post will stop displaying 1 second after midnight that morning). To make the start and end times unambiguous, you may want to put them in SQL format.

I currently don’t provide an editor button for finding the post or page ID, but you can grab it easily enough from the address bar in the WordPress editor.

I would typically suggest creating this chunk of content as a blog post. If you don’t want to make it public in the regular navigation flow of the site, you can save it as a draft and still use the WordPress editing tools to format and update that chunk of content independent of the page you are embedding it in.

If you want to use a page or any other post type, you need to add a post_type attribute.

Example:

Note that if you use a caching plugin, content may not disappear immediately after the end time you specified but only when the cache is purged or refreshed.

Those are my latest entries in the war against outdated web content.

Here is how you can use RSVPMaker’s built-in email utilities to send a weekly newsletter built around your upcoming events and recent blog posts. You can send to a MailChimp mailing list or to the members of your own website (if you provide user accounts).

I’ll be hosting a webinar on these techniques Weds. July 20, 2016 at 4 pm EDT.

The newsletters will look something like this when they arrive in the recipient’s inbox:

In a separate tutorial, I showed how to create an email broadcast built around an individual event or blog post. Here the idea is to set up a template for a broadcast that will go out on a regular schedule, including some standard elements.

The RSVPMaker events post that serves as the basis for this newsletter consists of a couple of WordPress shortcodes, placeholders for the dynamic content to be included. In the WordPress visual editor, the rsvpmaker_upcoming shortcode is represented as rounded blue box that you can click on for a popup menu of options. Here, I’ve set it up to pull only the webinar events off the RSVPMaker site (since most of the other events are demos).

The other shortcode displays headlines and excerpts from recent blog posts.

If I were to preview the email with just those settings, here is what I would see. The subject line would be the title of my post, RSVPMaker Roundup.

To send this out on a schedule, I need to set the options in the Scheduled Email section.

Here I have specified that this newsletter should go out every week to the RSVPMaker email list, on Wednesday at 10 am. Also, I want a preview sent to me 2 hours prior to the scheduled broadcast (a reminder of any last-minute changes I might need to make).

The “Test for” option allows me to set a condition, such as that the email newsletter should not be sent if there are no upcoming events on the calendar.

This gives me an email newsletter that can go out week after week, always with fresh content. However, I might also want to highlight specific items or add some particular customization to a specific week’s broadcast. The Editor’s Note section allows me to either enter a note or specify a blog post to be featured in the next scheduled email broadcast.

This also modifies the subject line, with either the title of the featured post or the headline of the editor’s note appended to the email subject line.

Example: RSVPMaker Roundup – Wednesday Webinar on RSVPMaker + MailChimp

The settings shown above would give me an email newsletter that looks like this. This note and headline would only be applied to the one specified week’s email.

Here is an example of a newsletter with a featured blog post included up top (note that the featured post is not repeated in the “From the Blog” section generated by the recent posts shortcode.

This combination has served me well, and I hope you can also put it to good use.

One of the basic customizations I should have documented long ago is how to change the RSVP Now! button. Here is the default button, originally created for a political campaign (hence the red, white and blue):

RSVP Now!

You can change the text, the colors, the fonts to be whatever you would like by modifying a snippet of HTML code with embedded CSS styling. It’s an option on the Settings -> RSVPMaker page about halfway down. Continue reading “How to Change the RSVP Now! Button”

If you assign an event type to an RSVPMaker post, site visitors can now click through to see an archive of related events. This is similar to how you would view all the blog posts in a category, except that only future events are shown in order of event date.

You can now also share RSS feeds of upcoming events and event types. Once you find the url for an event type archive, just add /feed/ to the end to get the RSS. Here are a couple of examples.

A feed of all the upcoming events tagged as featured:

https://rsvpmaker.com/blog/rsvpmaker-type/featured/feed/

A feed of all the events on the RSVPMaker website:

https://rsvpmaker.com/rsvpmaker/feed/

(Most of them demo events).

Here is an example of an event type archive. If you are ambitious enough to modify your theme, you may be able to improve the default display by creating custom templates. The naming convention is archive-rsvpmaker.php for all rsvpmaker posts or taxonomy-rsvpmaker-type.php for event types.