How to use custom post types as events

The amr-events plugin events can be

Which to use? some points to note:

  • Custom post types are a way of keeping a type of post “separate” from other posts.
  • Many Some plugins may work with standard posts, but not with custom posts.  (this has improved ) Eg: social sharing buttons, map/location plugins ,  filter plugins etc.  So investigate whether you expect them to work with your events or not, before deciding which to use.
  • Even if other plugins work with custom post types, you probably need to go back to their configuration once you have added a custom post type and add the new post type in to their configuration.
  • Alternatively if you want another plugin to work with your events, but NOT with your posts – eg: a geo tagging plugin, then maybe use custom posts instead.
  • Once you have added a new custom type type (or indeed a new taxonomy) you may need to flush your permalink rewrite rules.  It is not appropriate for the plugin to do this automatically as it can be computationally expensive – it is better if you decide when to do it.  It only needs to be done after configuration changes that affect the rules.  Goto your permalinks and resave your settings.

This plugin does many things, but specifically for custom post types:

  • it adds custom post type events to your rss feed and home page if you want – just tick the check box in the settings (from version 1.1 onwards).
  • it can add taxonomies if you wish – all the code you need is there, including special taxonomy widgets.

Settings > post types

Settings specific to custom post types
taxonomies
Taxonomies Examples

Further Information

Caution:

In researching custom post types and in particular how to add them to blog post home pages and rss feeds, I found complaints of lost custom menus, thumbnails when adding custom post types.  You can see some in the comments on Justin ‘s post on showing custom post types on the  home page. I believe that the reason for this is:

Most of the suggested code examples show setting (thus over-writing) the post types in the query, rather than checking if there any post types there already (remember  ‘post’ as a default of course) and adding to the list.

If one is using multiple plugins and themes that filter the wp-query to add post types (could be pages, attachments for thumbnail, custom menus etc)  eg with:

add_filter( 'pre_get_posts', 'a_function')

…in that case, plugins could overwrite each other’s filter criteria – it would depend on which filter got executed last.

This plugin checks first.  Also you can switch it’s version of the filter off completely.

For further information on how to use the plugin generally, see