September 06, 2011

Events Template Changes

We’ve made some event template changes as part of the roll out of LiveWhale Places and to be much more accurate when it comes to people finding past and future events. Location and LiveWhale Places When LiveWhale Places launched, it sort-of bumped the previous events location field. The events location was (and still is) a simple text field where you can indicate the event location(s). In the past it was of course the only option, but now with LiveWhale Places…

By David McKelvey

 

We’ve made some event template changes as part of the roll out of LiveWhale Places and to be much more accurate when it comes to people finding past and future events.

Location and LiveWhale Places

When LiveWhale Places launched, it sort-of bumped the previous events location field. The events location was (and still is) a simple text field where you can indicate the event location(s). In the past it was of course the only option, but now with LiveWhale Places (Plot this on a map) you can indicate a building with a few simple clicks (say JR Howard).

We could have dropped the location field, but felt it could serve an important new roll. Now you can use it to fill in those little extras like a room number, or things like “at the southeast entrance” that help people locate your event within a building. Be granular with it.

And this of course led to interesting change in the events template. If a Place has been set (highly recommended since it’s required to get your event on the digital displays), then it is listed first and followed by the location field. If either is missing/empty, then they obviously don’t appear.

This has been working well for the templates, and we do expect to push it through to the Calendar and the digital displays this week.

Event Years

Since LiveWhale archives events once they are past, we’d not considered that with repeating annual events that people might find old/outdated events that are wrong (and will stay wrong, since the new one is a different event). To handle this, we’ve worked with WhiteWhale to get the date formatting changed. Now, events in the past and future events not in this year will always have a year affixed. Problem solved.