How to add custom fields to your events

Contents

This is an EventKoi Pro feature.

EventKoi comes with all the basic event fields most people need, such as: time and date, location, event description, and featured image.

However, you might want to share repeatable additional information about your event, such as dress code, speaker, theme or more.

In that scenario, adding a custom field to your event is the best way to share such information.

Why use custom fields instead of event description?

Let’s say you run a community centre that has many events. For a one-off movie night event, you might simply add all of the event details into the event description.

However, let’s say that your first movie night event was such a big hit that you decided you want to host a weekly movie night. Not only that, after organising the first one yourself, you now want to hand over the organisation of the movie night to an intern. You want to make sure the intern shares all the correct details with potential movie night attendees by creating a form for them to fill out for future movie nights.

In this scenario, where you want a repeatable form for all movie nights, to ensure all the relevant information is mentioned, your best option is to create a group of custom fields that might include fields like:

Mature content rating
Genre
Rotten tomatoes rating

From there, your intern can add this group of custom fields every time there is a movie night and fill out all of the details accordingly.

Here are some additional example use cases for using custom fields:

Add a speaker name field for conference events.
Add a dress code field for community events.
Add a registration URL field for external ticketing.

Overview of the custom fields feature

The custom fields feature has three components to it:

Create custom fields: You can create a custom fields or groups in Settings. For example, a drop down field for Mature content rating.
Fill out custom fields: When creating a new event, you’ll have to fill out the basic fields like time and date. But you’ll also see a drop down box for Dress code allowing you to select the dress code for this particular event.
Display custom fields. By default, the event template will display all custom field data using meta keys. But you can customise it to display only specific custom fields or groups using meta keys or short codes.

You will need to understand how each component works in order to successfully use custom fields. So let’s go through each component in detail.

Create custom fields

Start by going to Settings, then Custom fields. Then click on Add field.

When creating a new field, you’ll see the following options:

Field name – The name of your field. This will be used as the label of the field on the frontend.
Field ID – What will be used to create shortcodes, meta keys and dynamic tags
Type – How admin users will fill out the custom field. For example, dropdown, checkbox, text…
Options – This depends on the type of custom field chosen. For example, if you want to create a dropdown, you will need to add the dropdown options.
Description – Accompanies the field and helps admin users know what the field is about and how to fill it out.
Group – By putting your field into a group, you can add the whole group of custom fields into your event with a single shortcode, rather than multiple shortcodes. If you don’t select a group, your custom field will be added to the Default group for you.
Make this a global field – Global fields are added to all newly created events. Non-global fields must be manually added to an event in the event settings.

In the example screenshot below, you’ll see a field called Mature content rating. The field ID is event_field_mature_content_rating

And it’s a dropdown field with the options: G, PG, R. This field has been added to the group called Movie night.

Create custom field group

To create a new group, navigate to Settings > Custom fields > Groups. Then click Add group.

You’ll see the following options for adding a new group:

Group name – The name of your group. This will be used as the label of the field on the frontend.
Group ID – What will be used to create shortcodes, meta keys and dynamic tags
Make this a global group – Global groups are added to all newly created events. Non-global fields must be manually added to an event in the event settings.

All custom fields added to a group marked as “Global” will be treated as global. You will not have to individually mark each custom field as “Global”.
If you do not want a particular field to be displayed within a global group, you must remove it from the group.

Fill out custom fields

Now that you have created your custom field in the settings, we will create a new event and fill out the new custom field for that event.

Head to Events and Add a new event.

In our case, we are creating a new event for a movie night showing How To Train Your Dragon.

Once we’ve filled out all the basic information like time and date and location, we want to navigate all the way down to Custom fields.

When you click on the dropdown, you’ll be able to see a list of all available groups and fields.

You can either add every single field manually, or add a group of fields to save time. In our case, we will add the group Movie night, which already includes all the fields we want.

Once we select the group, we can fill out the fields. For Mature content rating, the field is a dropdown box of available ratings. For Movie genre and Rotten tomatoes rating, the fields are text boxes as the data is more open ended.

Display custom fields

So far, we’ve created the custom fields we need for movie nights, then created our movie night event and added a custom field group and filled out the relevant details.

Now it’s finally time to see how our event page looks. As you can see, our custom fields are added beneath the event description, right at the bottom on the left hand side.

There are multiple ways to customise how your custom fields appear on your event page. But before that, you’ll need to know how to find and use the meta keys/shortcodes for your custom fields.

Custom field ID for meta keys and shortcodes

Let’s use the example of the Movie genre custom field we created. In this case, the field ID is: event_field_movie_genre.

The ID for a custom field or group is also its meta key. So the meta key for the Movie genre field is also: event_field_movie_genre

Next, the shortcode is: [eventkoi data=event_field_movie_genre].

If you would like to add the shortcode of a specific event, you can add the event ID to it: [eventkoi id=42 data=event_field_movie_genre]

These codes will output only the filled out data. If you also want to display the label, you should use the following:

Meta key: event_field_movie_genre_with_name

Shortcode:[eventkoi data=event_field_movie_genre_with_name]

Show all filled out fields

On top of displaying custom fields or groups, you can also display all filled out custom fields using a single meta key or shortcode:

Meta key: event_custom_fields_with_name or event_custom_fields

Shortcode: [eventkoi data=event_custom_fields_with_name] or [eventkoi data=event_custom_fields]

Where to find field ID

In Settings > Custom fields, you’ll see the IDs of all available fields. You can copy any ID in one click and use them as a meta key or shortcode.