A venue is a place you save once, with its address, map position and contact details, then pick for as many events as you like. Each published venue also gets its own page on your site, listing its upcoming events.
Create a venue
- Go to HappenBoard → Venues.
- Click Add venue. A form opens over the list.
- Type the Name. It is the only required field: if it is empty, Create venue puts you back on it with the hint “Enter a name.”
- Add a Photo and a Description if you like. The description appears on the venue’s page.
- Fill in the address, coordinates and contact details, explained below.
- Click Create venue.
A new venue is published at once. Only published venues appear in an event’s venue list and have a public page.
To change a venue, click its name in the list, edit the Edit venue form and click Save. The list’s Coordinates column shows which venues still have no map position.
Enter the address
The Address section has five fields: Street address, City, State / Region, Postal / ZIP code and Country. All of them are optional.
On your site, they are joined with commas and empty fields are skipped. Search engines also receive each part in the event’s structured data, as described in automatic Event schema.
Add the coordinates
The Coordinates section has two fields, Latitude and Longitude, in decimal degrees (for example 48.8566 and 2.3522 for Paris).
HappenBoard does not find them from the address: you type them yourself. To get them:
- Open the place in an online map that shows decimal coordinates. On Google Maps, right-click the spot and the two numbers appear at the top of the menu.
- Copy the first number into Latitude and the second into Longitude.
- Keep the minus sign if there is one: it means south of the equator, or west of Greenwich.
The latitude must be between -90 and 90 and the longitude between -180 and 180. A value outside that range is refused when you save.
Leave both fields empty if you do not know the position. If you change the address later, update the coordinates too: nothing does it for you.
Capacity and contact details
| Setting | What it does | Default |
|---|---|---|
| Maximum capacity | The room’s own limit, kept for your records. It does not limit sign-ups: for that, set the event’s capacity. | 0 (no limit) |
| Phone | Shown on the venue’s page. On a phone, visitors can tap it to call. | Empty |
| Website | Shown on the venue’s page as a link. It must be a web address, such as https://example.com. | Empty |
Attach a venue to an event
In the block editor, open the Venue panel of the event’s sidebar and pick a venue (type a few letters to narrow the list). Once a venue is picked, Edit Venue → opens its form in a new tab, and Manage venues → opens the venue list.
The quick event form has the same Venue field, in its Location & people section.
With no venue picked, the panel offers two free text fields instead, Venue name and Address. They suit a one-off place, but they have no coordinates, so no map and no venue page. The panel is hidden when the event’s format is virtual, as explained in in-person, virtual and hybrid events.
To give many events the same venue, use Edit fields… on the Events screen.
The venue’s page
Every event that shows its venue links to the venue’s page, at your site’s address followed by /venues/ and the venue’s name. The page shows:
- the description;
- the Address, with a View on OpenStreetMap link (View on Google Maps when Google Maps is your map provider);
- the Contact details: phone and website;
- Upcoming events at this venue: the next 10 dates, or “No upcoming events.”
The page does not embed a map, so it loads nothing from a map service. On a block theme, you can change its layout with the Single Venue template, as explained in patterns and Site Editor templates. To show the venue’s photo there, add a Featured Image block to that template.
On a site in several languages, a translated venue’s page lists the events linked to any of its translations. See multilingual sites.
Where the coordinates are used
- The Event Venue block draws a map when its Show map option is on. The map service is chosen in the maps settings.
- The weather forecast of an event is looked up for its venue’s position.
- The venue page’s map link opens at this position.
- Search engines receive the position in the event’s structured data.
- With HappenBoard Pro, the Events Clustered Map block places your events on a map, and the Events Near Me block measures distances from your venues.
A venue without coordinates works everywhere else: its name and address still show on events, lists and its own page.
If something goes wrong
- The map does not show: check that Show map is on in the Event Venue block and that the venue has both coordinates.
- Saving fails with “The latitude must be a number between -90 and 90” (or the same message for the longitude): check that you did not swap latitude and longitude.
- Saving fails with “The website must be a web address”: type the full address, starting with
https://. - A venue is missing from the event’s list: only published venues are offered.
Next steps
- Organizers: save the people or groups who run your events the same way.
- Maps: OpenStreetMap or Google Maps: choose the map your venues appear on.
- Building a single event page: place the Event Venue block on your event pages.