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Troubleshooting Common Issues with The Events Calendar Plugin

29 threads Sep 16, 2025 Plugin → The events calendar

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Many WordPress users rely on The Events Calendar to manage and display events. However, like any powerful plugin, it can sometimes present challenges. This guide covers some of the most frequent issues users encounter and provides practical solutions based on community experiences.

Common Problems and Their Solutions

1. Calendar Views Not Working or Pagination Issues

The Problem: Users often report that navigation buttons, like 'Next' or 'Previous', don't work. Clicking them either does nothing or reloads the same view.

Why It Happens: This is frequently caused by conflicts with caching plugins. Caching mechanisms can sometimes interfere with the AJAX requests the calendar uses to load new months or views.

The Solution: The most common fix is to adjust your caching plugin's settings. The Events Calendar team provides a specific knowledgebase article for WP Fastest Cache. If the problem persists, try temporarily disabling your caching plugin to confirm it is the source of the conflict. You may need to exclude the calendar pages from being cached.

2. Customization and Styling Challenges

The Problem: Users frequently want to customize the appearance of their calendar, such as changing the layout of the list view, adjusting image sizes, or modifying the filter bar to display as a horizontal list instead of a dropdown.

Why It Happens: The plugin's default templates and styles are designed to work with most themes. Customizations often require overriding these defaults with custom CSS or template modifications.

The Solution: For CSS changes, use your theme's customizer or a custom CSS plugin. To modify templates, you'll need to create a theme override. The Events Calendar's Themer's Guide is an excellent starting point. For complex changes, like altering the filter bar's HTML structure, you may need to create a custom template file based on the original found in the plugin's directory.

3. Features Not Displaying (Search Bar, Descriptions)

The Problem: Key features like the search bar or event category descriptions may not appear on the front end of your site.

Why It Happens: This is almost always due to a conflict with your active theme. The theme's CSS might be hiding the element, or its templates might not be fully compatible.

The Solution: First, try switching to a default WordPress theme like Twenty Twenty-Four to see if the feature appears. If it does, the issue is with your theme. Contact your theme's support for assistance or use browser inspection tools to identify the CSS rule that is hiding the element. The Events Calendar team has a knowledgebase article on displaying category descriptions.

4. Page Builder Integration (Elementor, Divi, Oxygen)

The Problem: Users building sites with page builders like Elementor, Divi, or Oxygen often struggle to embed or customize calendar views within their layouts.

Why It Happens: The free version of The Events Calendar is primarily designed to work with standard WordPress pages and archives. Deeper integration with visual page builders often requires additional widgets or extensions.

The Solution: For Elementor, The Events Calendar Pro offers dedicated widgets. For other builders, you may need to use shortcodes or custom code to display the calendar within your designed layouts. The plugin's main events page is typically a post type archive, which can be added to your site's menu via the WordPress menu editor under 'Screen Options'.

When to Seek Further Help

It's important to understand the scope of support for a free plugin. The Events Calendar team typically provides support for the plugin's default behavior and functionality. They often cannot provide full support for:

  • Custom code implementations
  • Deep integrations with third-party themes or page builders
  • Issues with premium extensions (which require a separate support ticket)

For issues beyond basic troubleshooting, the official Knowledgebase and DevDocs are invaluable resources for finding guides and code documentation.

By methodically working through these common issues, you can often resolve problems and get your event calendar functioning exactly how you need it to.

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