Event Organiser has always been a strong WordPress event plugin with a solid data model. It’s my go-to for WordPress CiviCRM event management.
Why? It gives you a real event post type, venues, recurring events, mapping, and a litany of functions to retrieve data to display in templates. It also works well with WordPress theme templates, which makes it easier to customize than heavier event tools like The Events Calendar. I honestly have tried The Events Calendar before and aborted it half-way through, due to fighting it when you need to more customization. It is clearly popular and if it works out of the box for you, great.
That’s all technical talk to say, it really is a great toolkit alongside CiviCRM because most importantly, it has a tight integration with CiviCRM Event Organiser.
But recently, Event Organiser had a maintenance problem. Unfortunately, the original author went quiet, which made it harder to recommend for new builds. The irony is that software is meant to be reliable and make for ease of maintenance in the age of AI, but frankly this was a concern needing addressing.
Thankfully, fellow CiviCRM partner Tadpole Collective has taken up maintenance through WPCV Event Organiser (EO), a maintained fork of the original plugin. Kudos to them for leading that work.
I’ve used Event Organiser a lot and saw a recurring set of needs that were not quite met. So, I ended up building Event Organiser Extras (EOX); an add-on plugin to make Event Organiser easier to display, manage, and use for a variety of client situations.
What Event Organiser Extras adds
Event date shortcodes
Event pages often need the same basic display details:
- Event date
- Event time
- Timezone
- Recurrence -> every month on the second Thursday
- Number of occurrences -> 5 Tuesdays
Event Organiser Extras adds shortcodes for those pieces, and a combined event sidebar shortcode. The README includes examples like “5 Tuesdays,” “every month on the second Thursday,” and date/time output with timezone support.
That makes it much easier to build custom event layouts in Elementor or a WordPress theme without coding the same display logic.
Better recurring event handling
Recurring events inherently complicate event management, and CiviCRM itself has had battles making this better. And that’s where the CiviCRM Event Organiser (CEO) plugin really is a saving grace. Thank you Christian Wach!
If an event runs every Tuesday for five weeks, or repeats monthly on the second Saturday, that should be obvious to the visitor. For recurring events, you may want the page to show only the next active registration link instead of every registration option at once. The list goes on…
CiviCRM registration link configuration
This is where EOX gets especially useful for CiviCRM-powered event sites.
If you are using CiviCRM Event Organiser for registration, Event Organiser Extras can display recurring registration links with more finesse.
For example, it can show the next active registration link by default, show all active links, or show a limited number of active links. I mean, if you are doing a weekly member welcome call every week, it’s probably not great to show 52 links, right?
Based on my experience with other client use cases, this can go a few different ways, so EOX provides the tooling to customize it easily.
An event details sidebar
Most event pages need a section to display the key details. Date. Time. Registration. Maybe recurrence information and a link to a Google Maps if you’re not fully virtual.
Event Organiser Extras includes an out-of-the-box event sidebar shortcode for single event pages. It comes with default markup and styling, but it’s really meant to overridden in your theme so you can make it exactly what you want.
That’s something I might otherwise rebuild in slightly different ways on various sites.
Future events admin menu shortcut
The plugin also adds a Future Events submenu under the WordPress Events admin menu.
When was the last time you wanted to see all events? Unusual, more like you wanna edit what’s upcoming and make your changes. This does that without an admin needing to keep re-filtering the event list.
Here’s the deal:
Right now, Event Organiser is my top recommendation to do exactly what you want with regard to Event Management in CiviCRM. WPCV Event Organiser gives WordPress the event structure it needs and now it’s maintained by a long-time partner, Tadpole, specializing in WordPress / CiviCRM. It’s the foundation.
Event Organiser Extras adds some of the practical display layer I kept needing on client sites, so the maintenance burden doesn’t fall onto any one of them. That’s an all around win for the WordPress CiviCRM community and the nonprofits that are looking for effective event management.