Using the term "Place" instead of "Location"

  • Resolved Daedalon

    (@daedalon)


    11 years, 2 months ago

    This is something I’ve been thinking since the first day I installed Events Manager: the places where Events are held should be called Places instead of Locations. In my understanding of English a place is, well, a place where you may go to, such as a restaurant or a park, and a location is used to refer to geography – where a place is in relation to other places.

    Place means something that is directly relevant to humans, such as Central Park. A location means its relation in space to other places: “40°47′N 73°58′W” and “at the corner of Broadway and 59th” are ways of expressing the location of a place.

    At the moment Events Manager has Locations that have locations, which doesn’t make sense. A location is a location, it cannot have a location. Things and places have locations.

    I’ve gotten halfway used to the mixed-up terms because I spend 8 hours with Events Manager on most days. None of our users spend that much time so they won’t get used to, and even if they did, it’s bad service to require them to adapt to a usage of the terms that could be made more clear. They come to the site looking for “events and places to go to” and then have to deal with either there not being any Places but only Locations or the site mixing those terms, which would be even more confusing.

    More than just harming the user experience, it affects SEO, as people search for “places”, not “locations”.

    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/events-manager/

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Jan-Erik

    (@finlander)

    11 years, 2 months ago

    I totally agree with you Daelalon 😀

    I’m localising into Finnish and found many spelling mistakes in English, as well as terms used in different way than English speaking people use…

    Maybe we can fix it by localising EM to British English and so on 😀

    Plugin Author Marcus (aka @msykes)

    (@netweblogic)

    11 years, 2 months ago

    there’s nothing stopping you from changing your formats and page content to say ‘places’

    to change other mentions of ‘location’, you could use something like:

    function my_em_text_rewrites($translation, $orig) {
$translation = str_replace('Booking','Ticket',$translation);
$translation = str_replace('booking','ticket',$translation);
return $translation;
}
add_action ( 'gettext', 'my_em_text_rewrites', 1, 2 );
    Thread Starter Daedalon

    (@daedalon)

    11 years, 2 months ago

    Thanks, Marcus! I’ll see about using that as a workaround. If it works, it solves the issue for our end-users, leaving only our developers and the users of other sites with the issue.

    My vote would be to clarify the terminology in plugin core, but I completely understand if that’s not something you wouldn’t consider a priority. Perhaps something for Events Manager 6?

    I’d think the reason EM currently uses the term “Location” instead of “Place” is history. Maybe “Location” once was only a set of custom fields stating the address where an event was held, and those custom fields were later extracted to be a custom post type, and despite the event now having a full-fledged “place”, the old term was more familiar and it stuck.

    Perhaps Events had locations before and it was the clearest to use the name Location, but at the moment Events have Places and the places have locations, so hopefully one day we’ll all get to call places “Places” and not “Locations”.

    Plugin Author Marcus (aka @msykes)

    (@netweblogic)

    11 years, 2 months ago

    I must admit “places” does sound good… as you say, it’s been there since the start and there was little point in changing it. It is more of an aesthetic change but involves a lot of work, so something we could consider as more ‘important’ features get added and off our todo list.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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