BuddyPress.org

I settled on Buddyvents as our event management plugin after looking at all the other options (Jet Events, Event Expresso, BP-events, etc..) – in my opinion Buddyvents is the most comprehensive and professional solution, vastly better than Facebook’s own capability and worthy of being a ‘paid’ plugin.

Buddyvents works via custom post types, where Events are basically a ‘type’ of Group. It therefore utilises the core BP group functions. All is great apart from two issues, which I’ve emailed Boris (@travel-junkie) about directly.

Firstly, the plugin extends the group fields adding street, postcode, city, country, telephone, mobile, fax, website – but the sting in the tail is that it adds these to the ‘create group’ process and makes street, postcode, city & country as mandatory fields. This is an unwelcome addition to the Groups set-up and I need to eliminate this for groups.

The second problem is that the Groups counter seems to be tallying up based on ‘groups+events’, which means the Group Directory shows a total that is greater than the number of groups visible on the site.

Clearly there needs to be a conditional step included within the buddyvents plugin which checks whether a core-group OR an event is being created and then uses this to display only the first two field entries in step 1 (name, description) and also only update the group total counter if it’s a group.

Note: my apologies to Boris, I’ve discovered that these additional group fields can be turned off in the admin > event > settings page. I’ll read the instructions next time…