On one page I maintain, there is a small calendar with courses and workshops. To manage those, I had to choose a plugin that offers all the features I needed. As I had more complex requirements for an event management plugin for work projects, I decided to go with the free version of the “The Events Calendar” plugin, and here is why.

What does The Events Calendar do?

First of all, it adds a couple of custom post types: Events, Venues and Organizers. It also adds two custom taxonomies: (Event) Tags and Event Categories. You don’t really need to use all of them, but if you do, you allow people to find events in the same venue, from the same organizer, and so on.

When you create an event, you can set a start and end time, or make it an “all day event” (even spanning multiple days). For the venue, you can choose to show a map in an individual event. You can also define costs for the event, but this only shows a price. The core plugin does not offer a ticketing system, let alone payment options. There is a free add-on plugin “Event Tickets and Registration“, which allows selling of tickets with Stripe or a PayPal business account. But since registrations are not done on that website I’m using it on, I don’t have this extension installed.

In terms of listing events, you have a month, list and day view. It comes with an events list widget and a keyword search. People can subscribe via an iCalendar file, Google Calendar, Outlook 365 and Outlook Live.

Events can be edited with blocks in the Block Editor, but on the site I maintain, we use it in combination with the Classic Editor, since the UX changes were just a bit too complicated for the person running the site.

Other add-ons to the plugin

There are pro versions of the core plugin and the tickets add-on. The quality of the official extensions is very good. The prices per site are justified, if events are your main business on those sites or if you even sell tickets. For sites where events are just a minor thing, I find them too high, and would probably use external services that charge you a percentage on a ticket sale.

The free version of the calendar is lacking one major feature: displaying events of a certain category on a page. This is useful, even for a personal site, and does not justify the high price for the pro version in my opinion. Luckily, I’ve found a plugin just for this purpose: The Events Calendar Shortcode & Block. With this plugin, you can list events of a category on a page or post, using either a shortcode or a block. It even offers an Elementor widget and Bricks element, but since I don’t use those two page builders, I don’t know how well they work. Even this free plugin has a pro version, but the free one is really all I need on that one website.

There are a lot of add-on plugins in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory, and even if you don’t find one that fits, you can customize The Events Calendar quite good, since it has a lot of actions and filters, which you can find in their DevDocs or learn more about how to use the plugins in their knowledgebase. This is another strong argument for me to use this as my main events management plugin. Other plugins also offer a deeper integration into this plugin, like the MultilingualPress plugin I’ve covered some day ago.

Conclusion

When it comes to event plugins, I usually always use The Events Calendar. For one, because I’m quite used to it, but even more because I like it’s code quality. I had to use another at one point, which offers recurring events (this is only available in the pro version of The Events Calendar), but the code quality was so bad, that I hated working with it every time. With more than 700,000 active installations, just for the free version, it’s also the most used event plugin from the WordPress.org Plugin Directory.

Have you used The Events Calendar before? Or do you use a different one? What make you choose one of the alternatives?