Every event needs a start. This guide covers the fields that set the date and time, why the editor asks for UTC, and what the all-day switch really changes.
The When panel
Open an event in the WordPress editor and look at the sidebar. The When panel holds three controls.
- All day event: a switch, off by default.
- Starts: the date and time the event begins. Until you choose one, the button reads as a prompt rather than a value, so an empty field is never mistaken for today.
- Ends: optional. Leave it blank and the end mirrors the start.
Click either button and a calendar opens. Pick a day, set the time, and the button label updates. A Clear button appears next to a field that already holds a value, so you can empty it again.
An event with no start is saved like any other post, but it produces no dated entry, so it will not appear on a calendar or in a listing until you fill the field in. If you are building your first event from scratch, start with the full walkthrough of the event editor.
Times are entered in UTC
Under the two fields, the panel states that times are stored in UTC, and the button label of a timed event ends in UTC. That is not decoration: the picker itself is showing UTC, not your local clock.
Public pages convert on the way out. The event page renders each date in your site’s time zone, using the date and time formats from Settings → General. So on a site running two hours ahead of UTC, a start typed as 19:30 is published as 21:30.
The admin Calendar screen is different again: it draws each date using your own browser’s time zone. If a chip looks an hour out from what you typed, that is why.
All-day events
Switching All day event on changes how the date is written, not what is stored. The editor drops the time from the button label, and the event page prints the date alone with no clock and no UTC suffix. The underlying start and end keep whatever time they already had.
Use it for anything a clock does not help with: a festival day, a public holiday, a deadline.
Setting dates from the admin screens
You do not have to open the full editor. Both HappenBoard list screens create events in a modal with the same fields under different labels: All-day event, Start and End.
- Go to HappenBoard → Calendar.
- Click a day number. The new-event form opens with the start already filled from the day you clicked and the end set one hour later.
- Adjust the two fields, give the event a title, then save.
On the same screen you can drag an event chip to another day or another hour to move it. For an event that repeats, dragging is refused, because moving one chip must not shift the whole series. Changing one date of a series is handled separately.
What saving does
Each time an event is saved, HappenBoard rebuilds its dated entries from the start, the end and the repeat rule. There is nothing to refresh by hand. A start you delete removes the event from every calendar and listing on the next save.
If the event repeats, the same save expands the rule into every date it produces. That is covered in the guide to building a repeat rule.