Originally published on Wpexplorer.com on December 10, 2019 By Freddy
I think you will agree when I say: running an events website is a challenging feat. You have to create events, publish the same on your website, and register participants without messing things up. When working with variables such as different times, prices, and venues for various events, the task becomes 10X harder.
It turns out; you can easily create an events management system on your site using the Modern Events Calendar plugin. And in today’s review/how-to post, we show you exactly why Modern Events Calendar is one of the best WordPress event plugins to grace the web.
Read on to discover the features and options that make the Modern Events Calendar plugin stand out from the crowd. Don’t forget to check out the cool videos we’ve added towards the end of the article. Other than that, please share your thoughts in the comments. That out of the way, let’s get down to business.
What is Modern Events Calendar?
Modern Events Calendar is a brilliant plugin that helps you to create, publish, and manage events on your WordPress website. It’s the brainchild of the Webnus Team, a revered WordPress theme, and plugin developer. The plugin is packed to the brim with all the features you need to manage events on your WordPress site like a pro.
And as the name suggests, Modern Events Calendar offers you the latest design methods and a practical way of managing events without breaking a sweat. As such, the plugin is mobile-ready, fully responsive, translation-ready, and plays well with your favorite tools, such as WooCommerce, among others.
Plus the plugin is exceptionally user-friendly and well-designed to save you a ton of time. Instead of wasting time configuring settings, you can set up the whole thing in a few clicks and hit the ground running. Creating and managing events with MEC is as simple as A, B, C, you won’t need anybody to hold your hand.
If you’re looking for a fantastic events management plugin for your WordPress website, Modern Events Calendar is the real deal. And thanks to great timely customer support, the plugin helps you to save time, money and provide a great user experience on your website.
Now that you know what we are working with, we’ll start with the free version of Modern Events Calendar. Later on in the review, we cover the PRO version and add-ons that offer you more functionality without breaking the bank. Without wasting another second, let’s see what the plugin provides in terms of features.
Modern Events Calendar Features
The Modern Events Calendar plugin packs quite a punch in the features department. Even the free version makes you smile with an impressive suite of features that go beyond what many competing plugins offer. You’ll have a great time with the free version, but should you choose to upgrade, you can only expect more powerful features.
The number of features on this thing is pretty long, but I will do my best to summarize what you can expect from a WordPress events plugin like no other. Besides, you’ll probably never need all the features anyway, but if you ever do, Modern Events Calendar doesn’t disappoint.
Modern Events Calendar ships with a wide variety of features as we’ve classified below.
Events Features
The plugin comes with a good selection of features and options that allow you to create a variety of event types easily. For starters, you can create single-day events, all-day events, and events that hold more than a day.
On top of that, you can customize your events extensively. For instance, you can add events to Google Calendar, iCal, or Outlook to manage events with your favorite tool. Additionally, you can easily add images, organizers, speakers, tags, categories, custom booking forms, hourly schedules, ticket variations, and location maps to your events.
Further, you can set events to repeat on custom days, e.g. every first Monday of each month and so on. That’s not all; you can create events that happen daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly. Also, you can create never-ending events, display featured events, set event countdowns, hide event time, add dynamic event labels, and do so much more.
Fret none; you get to see most of these features in action when we test drive the plugin later in the article. For the time being, let’s cover more features.
Display Features
In terms of displaying events on your website, the Modern Events Calendar plugin is not short of attractive layouts that don’t get in the way of user experience. Your events look sharp and clean and are accessible to view and book. This is indeed great news since many other event plugins require tons of customization to achieve a decent look.
But Modern Events Calendar will have none of that. To help you display your events in the best light possible, the plugin comes with multiple color skins, ability to choose custom colors, Font Awesome icons, 5 list view styles, 7 grid view styles, full calendar view, agenda view, masonry view, events on Google Maps, powerful event search and so on.
So whether you want to display your events in a grid, list, carousel, or modal, the Modern Events Calendar plugin has your back. With full RTL support, filters, and so much more, your events will look good on a variety of devices. Plus, thanks to all the customization options you get, you can align your events with your brand in a matter of minutes.
Booking Features
Modern Events Calendar is quite integration-friendly. Whether you’re using another WordPress event plugin or app, Modern Events Calendar doesn’t discriminate. You can integrate the plugin with a variety of event calendar plugins seamlessly.
What that means is you can easily import events from other WordPress event plugins and services. Other than that, you can export your events to third-party platforms with absolute ease. Additionally, Modern Events Calendar works with WooCommerce and a variety of page builders out of the box.
The plugin is extremely flexible, allowing you to run a fully automated event and booking management system on your site. From creating to displaying and booking events, Modern Events Calendar streamlines your workflow so you can focus on growing your business.
Modern Events Calendar is compatible with SEO plugins, WordPress multi-site, EventOn, The Events Calendar, Calendarize, cache plugins, Google Calendar, and Events Schedule WP Plugin, among others.
Developer Friendly Features
Modern Events Calendar is the perfect tool for WordPress power users, thanks to a suite of developer-friendly features. For starters, you can override pages, archives, and color skins in your theme. Additionally, you can fire custom WordPress functions, filter plugin options, customize shortcodes, and do so much more using hooks.
How to Install Modern Events Calendar Lite
So far so good we’ve been testing the waters, if only with our toes. It’s time to take the plunge. We can’t learn anything by sticking to the edges, so let’s dive in and get hands-on experience with this beast. The free version is available on the official WordPress plugin repo, so you know this is going to be easy.
Navigate to Plugins > Add New, as shown below.
Next, enter “Modern Events Calendar” in the search box, and then hit the Install Now button.
After that, hit the Activate button to finalize the installation.
Doing so leads you to the Modern Events Calendar welcome page you see in the screengrab shown below.
From the image above, notice the new M.E. Calendar item on the WordPress admin menu. At this juncture, you can start creating events.
Creating Events
Creating a new event using the Modern Events Calendar is easy. Navigate to M.E. Calendar and click Add Event, as shown in the image below.
Doing so leads you to a familiar-looking editor, as we detail below.
Add your event title, description, and scroll down to add more event details as we highlight below.
On the above screen, you can add all the details of your event. You can add location, venue, organizers, cost, hourly schedule, event repeating, featured image, and so on. It is effortless creating events with the Modern Events Calendar plugin.
Once you add all the details you require, hit the Publish button to post the event to your website. Here is how our sample event looks on our test website.
Looks great if you ask me ?
However, users cannot book events yet since we haven’t activated the booking module, which – if you recall – is only available in Modern Events Calendar PRO.
To activate the booking module in the pro version, navigate to M.E. Calendar > Settings > Booking, tick the Enable booking module checkbox and click the Save Changes button as shown below.
Doing so adds Payment Gateways to your MEC booking settings and a Bookings item to your WordPress admin menu.
Now that you can create an event and display it on your website, let us cover Modern Events Calendar Pro and add-ons.
Modern Events Calendar Premium Add-Ons
If you need more features, you can always spring for Modern Events Calendar Pro. Webnus offers three packages: 1 license at $75 bucks, five licenses at $255, and 10 licenses at $455 bucks.
Choose the plan that works for you, purchase and download the plugin. Next, log in to your WordPress admin dashboard, and navigate to Plugins > Add New.
On the Add Plugins screen, click Upload Plugin, choose the Modern Events Calendar .zip file and go to Install Now.
Next, activate the plugin.
After that, click M.E. Calendar, scroll down, enter your purchase token and click the Submit button as shown below.
Now that your premium version of Modern Events Calendar is ready, let us explore a few premium add-ons. To view and install add-ons, navigate to M.E. Calendar > Addons as shown below.