Starter Guide

How to Create Your First Event in WordPress

This EventPrime Starter Guide will give you a walkthrough on how to setup EventPrime on your WordPress website and publish your first event. It will also cover quick glances at some of the configurable event properties of EventPrime’s Events. So, let us wait no more and get started!

Installation and Activation

The first step here is to install and activate EventPrime on your WordPress website. You can do this from the ‘Plugins’ menu inside your WordPress Dashboard. On the ‘Plugins’ page inside the dashboard, click on the ‘Add New’ button at the top. Then search for EventPrime. Click on ‘Install’ and then ‘Activate’ to activate EventPrime on your site.

The Event Calendar

As soon as the plugin is activated, you’ll be redirected to the ‘Events’ screen of EventPrime. This is a hub screen too, from where you can configure most of your event properties. Right away, you can see that there’s a calendar here with no events in it.

EventPrime features an event calendar from where you can add and edit your events quickly. This calendar appears the same inside the WP Dashboard as it does on the site front-end. This gives you a seamless event management experience as you can see how events will appear to the users on your site from right within the WP Dashboard itself.

Next, let us move forward and create our first event. You can either click on the ‘Add New’ link at the top left of this screen, Or, you can simply click on a date in the calendar. This will open a pop-up form asking you to enter the new event’s essential details. Enter in your event’s title, start date, end date and create the event by clicking on the ‘Save’ link at the bottom of the form.

Once created, the event will show up on the event calendar. It will appear as a colored bar on the calendar spanning the dates on which the event is taking place. The color of the event bar will be the color of this event’s type. Which in this case, is the standard blue color of EventPrime since no Event Type is created yet.

Now you might be thinking how to set an Event Type for your event. To answer this question, we’ll move to the next step of configuring the event’s properties. And that we are going to do from the Event’s Settings.

The Event Dashboard & Settings

Hover over the event bar on the calendar and you’ll see the event details appear in popup. In this, you can have a quick look at the details you added for the event. The details this case are just the title, start date, and end date for the event. Additionally, this popup also displays the event’s shortcode, which you can use to publish it on any page or post. At the bottom of this popup are the ‘Dashboard’ and ‘Settings’ links, as well as a trash can icon to delete the event. Click on the ‘Dashboard’ link and it’ll lead you to the Event Dashboard.

The Event Dashboard is where all settings related to a single event can be configured. This includes setting an Event Site for your event, adding Performers to it, and tweaking the event’s core settings. For now, let’s just set the Event Type for our event.

Click on the Event Settings icon in the Event Dashboard. This will take you to the core settings for the event. You can also reach Event Settings by clicking the ‘Settings’ link from the event details popup. Inside Event Settings, right below the Name setting, you’ll see the Event Type selection. Now, I am going to set the type of our new event to ‘Concert’, which I created from the ‘Event Type Manager’ screen. You can access the ‘Event Type Manager’ screen by clicking the ‘Event Types’ menu from the EventPrime WordPress Dashboard menu.

For more details on how to work with ‘Event Types’ in EventPrime, please visit our Event Types Guide.

In addition to setting the type of the event, I’ll upload a feature image for our event as well and then save the changes. Next, let’s go back to the ‘Events’ screen and see how this change affects our event in the calendar. The event bar now appears in an orange color, which is the color I had set for the event type ‘Concert’.

Likewise, when you have many events on your site, users will be able to easily identify which events are of which event type.

View All Events

All the essential properties are now configured for our event, so let us now see how EventPrime is going to display this event to the users on the frontend. The front-end event calendar will appear on the [em_events] shortcode. You can put this shortcode on any WordPress page or post of your choice. However, EventPrime creates a page with this shortcode automatically upon activation. This page will exist on your site at the URL: http://www.yoursite.com/events

You can quickly access this page by clicking the ‘Frontend’ link from the top right links on the backend ‘Events’ screen.

On this page, you have an event calendar with multiple views, such as Month, Week, Day, List, and Card. And each view has a unique way of displaying your event details. From here, users can click on an event and visit that event’s page for complete details. Also, users can register for the event if bookings are enabled.

The calendar is followed by a list of Event Types and their colors so users can easily identify which event belongs to which type by their color.

Final Words

Although I complete the EventPrime Starter Guide here, rest assured that this is only the tip of the iceberg. EventPrime offers so many more options to add weight to your WordPress site events. We’ll continue to publish more guides like this on the other amazing features of EventPrime. Stay tuned!