“Map Unavailable” shouldn’t be shown for virtual events

  • Resolved Daedalon

    (@daedalon)


    4 years, 3 months ago

    After many years of not using Events Manager, I was happy that a fresh install supported virtual events out of the box. However, the crucially important default event template doesn’t handle these well.

    1. It shows “Map Unavailable” for a virtual event, for which the map couldn’t even be relevant. If a location can’t possibly be shown, the map element should be removed from view.

    2. It shows “Map Unavailable” even when there’s no Google Maps API key added in the EM Settings. The instructions in the settings page say that “Google Maps require an API key”, so the map couldn’t possibly be shown without this, so the element shouldn’t be shown.

    What is already working well is that if the whole Google Maps integration is turned off, then this unhelpful error message is not shown on the frontend event template. The same “if” that toggles it on and off should also take into account the two factors mentioned above: the event being virtual and not having a location, and the Google Maps settings not being fit for showing a map.

    A few bonus comments:

    3. Could we get support for events that have both a location and a website link? I think these shouldn’t be either or, but the event should have or not have a location, and then have or not have a website. The default install should provide fields for both, which aren’t mutually exclusive.

    4. Could we get support for an alternative map service besides Google Maps? OpenStreetMap or something else that is able to show a map, isn’t super expensive, and isn’t such a serial infringer against privacy as Google products are. It doesn’t need to be a fancy map, not necessarily even dynamic; anything that shows the location is a great start and can be improved in later iterations.

    I’d like to display website links to all events that have those, as well as maps for those that have a physical location, without having to deal with Google Maps API keys, handing over users’ privacy to Google etc. I’d say these both are reasonably common already, and more so all the time, so I hope these capabilities make it into Events Manager sooner rather than later 🙂

    5. “Google Maps” is a single product, despite its name being in plural, so I’d say the above quoted text on the settings page should read “Google Maps require”, with no “s” in the end of require.

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  • Thread Starter Daedalon

    (@daedalon)

    4 years, 3 months ago

    A few more related ones:

    6. The default frontend template’s Location element doesn’t work correctly for virtual elements. It just displays the title, but the event URL. It’s also not making use of the event URL text that EM just forced me to type 🙁

    As it is, this empty “Location” header would be better left undisplayed; but the real goal should be to display the link to the website. Although, as I argue in my other post, event website shouldn’t be confused with location, as all events can have a separate website, whether they have a location or not.

    7. “Categories: No Categories” is also something that should be left off from the default template. Anything that adds visual heaviness to the UI and requires brain-time to read and interpret needs to be justified with information value, which this doesn’t provide. I’d suggest leaving this one as not displayed at all when there are no categories selected.

    8. “Date/Time” is a weird header. It literally means “either or”, whereas the default content displays both. The correct header in this case would be just “Time”.

    9. The subheader “Date(s) – ” is also redundant, and would be best removed from the default template. A date is recognizable from its formatting. Alternatively an icon can be used, like many WordPress themes do by default, taking less space and requiring no reading.

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)

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