Event Date Sorting

• alexstanhope

• June 18, 2017 at 12:28 am

Hey all,

I know a lot of you have used the ever-wonderful ACF to set up events calendars, and now it’s my turn!

I’ve used the following code and the pre_get_posts filter to hide past events within the relevant archive page, and it’s working brilliantly.

However, I’ve got certain events that don’t have an “end_date” value associated with them, and I’d still like to show these – the problem I have is that with the query shown here, they are being hidden.

Based on this, I was wondering if any of you might know how to modify the query so that events with the “end_date” field are shown in order as before, but those without still get shown within the archive?

To hopefully help with this, I’ve created an “event_date” field in ACF which has three possible values: “one-off”, “recurring” and “tbc” – only Posts with “one-off” set have an “end_date” if that makes sense?

I will very much look forward to hearing of any thoughts you might have!

Alex

function event_cpt_query($query){
	
		if($query->is_main_query() && !$query->is_feed() && !is_admin() && $query->is_tax('type','talks')){
			
			$today = date('Ymd');
			
			$meta_query = array(

				array(
					'key' => 'end_date',
					'compare' => '>=',
					'value' => $today,
				),
				
			);

			$query->set( 'meta_query', $meta_query );
			$query->set( 'orderby', 'meta_value_num' );
			$query->set( 'meta_key', 'end_date' );
			$query->set( 'order', 'ASC' );
			
		}
		
	}
	
	add_action( 'pre_get_posts', 'event_cpt_query' );

• John Huebner

• June 18, 2017 at 10:13 am

It really depends on what else your displaying posts based on when there is no end_date, but you can get all values > today or posts that do not have end_date set something like this

$meta_query = array(
  'relation' => 'OR',
  array(
    'key' => 'end_date',
    'compare' => '>=',
    'value' => $today,
  ),
  array(
    'key' => 'end_date',
    'compare' => 'NOT EXIST'
  ),
);

https://codex.wordpress.org/Class_Reference/WP_Query#Custom_Field_Parameters

• alexstanhope

• June 19, 2017 at 7:57 am

Hi John,

Thanks so much for your help with this; hugely appreciated!

As it happens, no sooner than I had posted my question on these here boards, I came up with the following solution, and it was very similar to yours, so hopefully it’s a case of great minds thinking alike and all that!

Thanks again for your reply, and it’s all working brilliantly now!

Alex

$meta_query = array(
				
				'relation' => 'OR',

				array(
					'key' => 'end_date',
					'compare' => '>=',
					'value' => $today,
				),
				
				array(
                    'key' => 'event_date',
                    'value' => 'standard',
                    'compare' => 'NOT LIKE',
                ),
				
			);