Calendar, registration, recurring events, and speaker management. The most-used module after Members.
What you can do
- Publish a calendar of upcoming events with descriptions, locations, dates, times, and images.
- Take registrations online, with separate member and non-member prices and card payment through Stripe.
- Ask each attendee a question when they register — a meal choice, say — where each answer can change the price and have its own limit.
- Repeat an event weekly or monthly without creating each one by hand.
- Keep speakers in one list, so the same speaker can be added to many events.
- Email attendees a reminder before an event, and a confirmation when they register.
- Pull other organizations' events into your calendar from their iCal feeds.
- Publish your calendar as an iCal feed members can subscribe to in Google Calendar or Apple Calendar.
How to add your first event
Events → Add Event. Title, description, date, time, location. Save.
If you want online registration, tick Enable registration. Set the member price and the non-member price (0.00 for a free event), and a registration limit if the room only holds so many.
A confirmation email goes out to everyone who registers. Its subject line is under Settings → Events.
How to make an event recurring
On the event edit page, find Recurring Event and pick from Recurrence:
- Every week on the same day
- Every month on the same weekday — the second Tuesday, the last Friday
- Every month on the same date — the 15th
Set Repeat Until, or leave it blank for twelve months. Save. SocietyPress creates each occurrence as its own event, so you can change one without touching the rest — when one month's meeting moves to a different room, edit just that one.
To take an occurrence out of its series completely — the December meeting is at a restaurant instead of the library — open it and click Detach from Series. It becomes a standalone event. This can't be undone.
How to manage speakers
Events → Speakers. Add a speaker once with their bio, photo, and contact info. Then on any event's edit page, add them to the event and pick their role: Speaker, Instructor, Moderator or Panelist. The event page shows their bio and photo.
An event can have several speakers — a panel, or a workshop with co-presenters.
How to subscribe to other calendars
Events → External Calendars takes iCal addresses from elsewhere — a partner society's calendar, the county library's events. SocietyPress checks them on a schedule and adds their events to your calendar. Each feed shows when it last synced and the last error, if any; Sync now checks immediately. To edit one imported event on its own, open it and click Detach from Feed.
Your own calendar is published as a feed too. Your public events pages have a Subscribe menu that opens it in a calendar app or gives the address to copy into Google Calendar; a signed-in member gets their own address that includes members-only events. Subscribed calendars stay up to date on their own. The feed can be switched off under Settings → Events.
How to put the calendar on a page
Use the page builder: drop the Events Calendar widget on a page for a month grid, or Upcoming Events for a list.
Most societies put Upcoming Events on the homepage and a full calendar on a dedicated events page.
If something looks wrong
The occurrences aren't showing up. Save the event, then reload the events list. They're created when you save.
Registration says Stripe isn't set up. Add your Stripe keys under Settings → Events → Online Payments. Test mode with Stripe's test keys works for trying it out; switch to live keys when you're ready.
A member registered but didn't get a confirmation email. Check your site can send email at all — "Lost your password?" on the sign-in page with your own address is the quickest test. If that never arrives, your host is probably blocking WordPress's mail; see Email Setup.
An external iCal feed isn't coming in. Events → External Calendars shows when each feed last synced and its last error. Click Sync now to try again. If the address has changed at the source, edit it. Feeds that need a password aren't supported.
A weekly series runs too far ahead. Set Repeat Until to the date it should stop. Left blank, a series runs twelve months.
Related guides
- Members — registrations link to member records
- Donations — events can collect donations on top of registration fees
- Governance — committee meetings live here too
- Blast Email — send event reminders to specific groups