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Create your first event

Available in:Free

Each HappenBoard event gets its own page, where visitors read the details and sign up. Below, you create one event, publish it, and show your events on a calendar page.

Before you start

  • HappenBoard is installed and active: a HappenBoard menu appears in your admin sidebar. If not, see installation and requirements.
  • Your site’s time zone is correct under Settings → General. Event times use it, so check it before you add dates.

Open a new event

  1. Go to HappenBoard → Events.
  2. Click the small arrow next to New event, then New event in block editor.

The usual WordPress editor opens, with the event settings in the sidebar on the right. A short welcome tour appears the first time. Close it when you like: it stays available in the editor’s three-dot menu, under HappenBoard event guide.

The New event button itself opens a shorter form, described at the end of this page.

Fill in the event

  1. Type the name of the event in the title field.
  2. Write the description in the content area, as you would in a post.
  3. In the When panel of the sidebar, click Starts and pick the day and time.
  4. Check Ends. It fills in by itself, 60 minutes after the start (the default length, which you can change in HappenBoard → Settings → General).
  5. If the time does not matter, switch on All day event.
  6. In the Venue panel, pick a venue from the list. If you have none yet, type a Venue name and an Address instead.
  7. To limit the number of places, set Maximum attendees in the Capacity panel. Leave it at 0 for unlimited sign-ups.

Times are in your site’s time zone, named under the date fields. For the details of each date field, see dates, times and all-day events.

You can leave the other panels for later:

Publish the event

  1. Click Publish at the top right, then Publish again to confirm.
  2. Click View Event to open its page.

An event cannot be published without a start. If Starts is empty, WordPress shows a “Publishing failed” message asking you to set when the event starts. You can still save a draft with no date.

Check the event page

The event page already shows the date, a countdown, your description, an RSVP Form for sign-ups, the venue and organizer when set, and an Add to Calendar button. You do not need to add these blocks yourself, and the form already knows the capacity.

To change this layout, edit the single event template, as explained in building a single event page. On a block theme, do not also add these blocks to the event content, or they appear twice.

People who sign up are listed under HappenBoard → Attendees.

Show your events on a page

Your published events already appear at your site’s address followed by /events/, with a calendar and a list. To put a calendar on a page of your choice:

  1. Go to Pages → Add New Page.
  2. Give the page a title, such as “Events”.
  3. Click the + block inserter, search for “Calendar” and add the HappenBoard Calendar block.
  4. Click Publish.

The calendar opens on the current month and lists every published event. Visitors click an event to open its page. The Calendar block explains its options.

Use the quick form instead

Clicking New event (not the arrow) opens a window titled Add event. It has the main fields in short sections: Event title, Start and End, Venue, Capacity, Format, Recurrence and a short Summary, but no full description.

Create event publishes the event at once, so set Start before you click it. End then fills in by itself with the default length; change it if you need to. To add a full description later, use Edit in full editor on the event’s row in HappenBoard → Events.

On the HappenBoard → Calendar screen, clicking a day opens the same form with the date and end time already filled in.

Next steps

On this page