Some Thoughts on the Toastmasters District 101 Website

I’m Webmaster for Toastmasters District 101, which started operations on July 1, 2016. For the previous two years, I had been on the Webmaster team for Toastmasters District 4; District 101 covers the area from Mountain View to Monterey, which was in District 4 until July 1.

As Webmaster for District 101, I had to choose a CMS (I chose WordPress and a theme (Divi)). I had help from other members of the District 101 Foundations team in picking other plug-ins and in creating the content for the website.

This will be the first, and possibly not the last, in a series of postings about the website and the other code I write in support of it. I’m posting here for two reasons:

• Perhaps it’ll help someone else
• Perhaps I’ll be able to find it in the future!

You can decide which is the more important reason.

Tweaking The Events Calendar

We chose to use The Events Calendar from Modern Tribe as our calendar tool.

Out of the box, it works well, but I wanted to display some information about the kinds of events we would show on the District Calendar and how to search for an event.

The obvious way to do that was to use the “Add HTML before event content” feature in Advanced Template Settings; unfortunately, when I added the information there, it not only appeared on calendar listings, it appeared when you chose a single event to display (and in that case, there was no search bar available, so it was really confusing!).

I found two ways to get the kind of display I wanted:

• Override default-template.php by copying it from the-events-calendar/src/views/ to my-child-theme/tribe-events/ and then only calling tribe_events_before_html if I wasn’t displaying a single event; this has the advantage of making the information editable in the Events Calendar settings.
• Add a new action for the tribe_events_bar_before_template hook that would display my information if and only if the search bar was going to be displayed. This has the disadvantage of requiring me to hard-code the information in my action.

I decided to go with the first choice, which also required me to be sure to use the “Default Events Template” instead of the “Default Page Template” in the Events Calendar settings.

Here’s the diff to create my modified default-template.php file:

@@ -17,7 +17,11 @@
 get_header();
 ?>
 <div id="tribe-events-pg-template">
-        <?php tribe_events_before_html(); ?>
+    <?php
+        if (!(tribe_is_event() && is_single())) {
+            tribe_events_before_html();
+        };
+    ?>
         <?php tribe_get_view(); ?>
         <?php tribe_events_after_html(); ?>
 </div> <!-- #tribe-events-pg-template -->