How to

This is the operator’s guide to {{PRODUCT}} — the listings platform behind {{SITE}}. It assumes you can use a web browser and nothing else. Where a job needs a person, it says who, how often, and what goes wrong if nobody does it.

1. What the platform does

It is a gig guide for one town. It holds four kinds of thing and the connections between them:

• Events — a gig, a screening, a market, a quiz. What is on, where, when and how much.
• Venues — the rooms. Each has an address, a map pin, a neighbourhood and its own page listing what is coming up there.
• Acts — bands, solo performers, DJs. Each has a page listing every gig they are on.
• Promoters — the people booking the bands and taking the risk on the door.

Everything else is a way of getting information into those four, or a way of getting it back out.

Key features

2. The rhythm of the job

The single most useful thing in this guide. Most of the platform looks after itself; these are the jobs that need a person, and roughly how often.

3. The Desk

Who: whoever runs the listings. Daily.

The Desk is the main working screen. It is a page on the public site — not the WordPress admin — so it works on a phone and you can hand access to someone who should not be let near the rest of the site.

Getting in

The Desk asks for a passphrase. Anyone already logged in as an editor or administrator skips it. To set or change the passphrase, go to the Desk page while logged in as an administrator; the box is at the top.

What you do there

The Desk lists upcoming events, newest first, with a search box and a venue filter. Each row opens to show the fields most likely to be missing:

• Strapline — one line under the title. “Support from the Lee Harvey Oswalds.” Not a sentence about how great the night will be.
• Category — Live Band, Comedy, Film and so on. Always set this. It drives the filters, the colours and the schema.
• Genre — rock, folk, ska. Only for music, and only if you actually know.
• Tags — free-form. Useful for things a category cannot express: “vinyl”, “all-dayer”, “charity”.
• Price and Free — see the note below.
• Ticket link — where to buy. Paste the full address.
• Picture — pick from recent uploads.
• Acts — attach any band or performer on the system, or type a new name to create one.
• Flags — Featured (promotes it on the front page), Sold out, Social pick.

4. Getting events in

Four routes, in rough order of how much work each one is per gig.

Calendar feeds — the cheapest

Who: you, to set up. Then five minutes a day to approve.

Settings → {{PRODUCT}} feed. If a venue already publishes its gigs to a calendar — most ticketing systems do — subscribe to it here and new gigs arrive automatically.

They arrive as suggestions, not live listings. You see what came in, which venue it matched, and a proposed strapline, and you publish the ones you want. Nothing reaches the public site without a person clicking publish.

• Every imported gig is tagged with its calendar’s own ID, so running the import twice does not create it twice.
• The importer guesses the venue from the location text. Check it — a venue named slightly differently in the feed can land at the wrong pub.
• Categories follow the venue’s default where one is set.

Bulk import — for a batch

Who: you. Weekly.

The fastest way to add a week’s worth at once. You produce a spreadsheet with one row per gig and import it through the site’s importer.

The spreadsheet has a fixed set of columns and they must be in the right order. The two that catch people out:

• The venue is a number, not a name — the venue’s own ID. Get it from the venue list. A wrong number files the gig at a different pub and nothing looks broken.
• The category is a number too. Live Band, Comedy and the rest each have one.

The Desk — for one or two

Fine for a handful. Slow for thirty.

Claims — free labour

A venue that has claimed its own listing can add its own gigs. See Claims and accounts.

5. Dates, times and recurring nights

A gig has a date, a start time and optionally a finish. A recurring night — a weekly open mic, a monthly market — is one event with many dates rather than fifty separate events. That matters:

• It gets one page, one set of pictures, one description.
• Editing it changes every future date at once.
• It appears in the listings on each of its dates.

Set up recurring nights in the WordPress event editor. Everything else can be done from the Desk.

6. Venues

Who: you. When a new venue appears, then rarely.

Each venue needs, at minimum, a name and an address that finds the right place on a map. Beyond that:

7. Acts, bands and billing

Who: you, or the band once they have claimed their page.

An act is a band, a solo performer, a DJ or a club night. Attaching an act to a gig does two things at once: the gig lists the act, and the act’s own page lists the gig. One action, both directions — there is nothing to keep in sync.

Billing

Each act on a bill can be marked Headliner, Support, Special guest, DJ or Host. This changes how the gig reads on that act’s own page:

the support act's page   →  "supporting Stray"
the headliner's page     →  "with Dylan Vers"
a solo act's own gig     →  (nothing — silence is right)

Musicians who play in several bands

Joe plays guitar in one band, sings backing in another, and gigs on his own. All three are acts. You record that Joe is in those bands, with what he plays, and then:

• Joe’s page lists his own gigs and both bands’ gigs, each marked “with The Bloggs”.
• Each band’s page lists its line-up, with instruments.

A band that is deleted or unpublished quietly stops appearing in anyone’s list — there is no tidying up to do.

8. Promoters

Promoters are the people putting gigs on — the ones who book the band and take the risk on the door. They get a page listing what they have coming up, and a gig can credit one.

Worth keeping accurate because promoters are the people most likely to send you listings unprompted, and a promoter with a decent page on your site is a promoter who will remember to.

9. Categories, genres and tags

Three different things, often confused:

Categories come with colours and icons, drive the filters, and tell search engines what kind of event it is. Always set one. Genre and tags are optional and should be left blank rather than guessed.

10. Pictures

Who: you. Every event, ideally.

An event with no picture looks abandoned. The platform looks for one in several places and uses the first real one it finds — the featured image, then the gallery.

Practical advice: a poster photographed in a pub window is fine. A blurry one is worse than none.

11. Screens for bars

Who: you, when a venue asks. Ten minutes each.

A venue can put a telly above the bar showing a full-screen scrolling display of their own gigs. Each one is a page on your site that the venue opens in a browser and leaves running.

Setting one up

1. Go to Settings → {{PRODUCT}} screens.
2. Add a screen. Give it a short name, pick the venue (or venues), and choose how many gigs to show.
3. Decide whether it should widen to the whole town when the venue has nothing coming up — usually yes, so the screen is never blank.
4. Copy the shortcode it gives you.
5. Make a new page, paste the shortcode in, publish it, and send the venue the address.

The screen refreshes itself and reloads periodically, so it stays current without anyone touching it.

12. The poster builder

Who: anyone with Desk access. As needed.

Generates a social-media poster for any gig. Pick the gig, choose a shape (square for Instagram, portrait for Stories, landscape for Facebook), and it draws the picture, the act, the venue, the date and the price.

• House style — uses the venue’s colours and logo if they have them, otherwise the site’s.
• Shift — moves the picture within its frame so a face is not cropped off.
• Divider — moves the line between picture and text panel.
• Type treatment — standard, loud, or quiet.

The result downloads as an image. Nothing is published anywhere by the builder; what you do with the poster is up to you.

13. The front page and tickers

The front page is assembled from shortcodes, so you can rearrange it by editing the page rather than the code. The main pieces:

• Tonight — what is on today.
• Featured — a scrolling ticker of gigs you have flagged as featured.
• Recently added — a count and a link, for people who check back. Bulk imports are deliberately excluded so that fifty gigs arriving at once does not read as “50 new”.
• Search — one box across gigs, venues and promoters.

See the shortcode list for the details.

14. Social picks

Who: you. As you spot them.

Tick Social pick on the Desk to flag a gig as worth posting about. The flag is editorial — you are saying “this one deserves a post”, and the system keeps a queue of them.

15. Claims and accounts

Who: you, to approve. As they arrive.

A venue, band or promoter can create an account and claim their listing. Once you approve the claim they can edit that listing themselves — change the description, add a picture, add gigs.

This is the cheapest listings labour you will ever get, and worth actively encouraging. Two rules:

• Check the claim is real before approving. An email from the venue’s own domain, or a message from the account the venue posts from, is enough.
• One claim per listing. Approving a second claim on the same listing replaces the first — the new person takes over and the previous one silently loses access.

16. Moving from an old site

Who: you, once, at launch.

If you are replacing an existing gig guide, its addresses are in Google and in people’s bookmarks. Left alone, every one of them becomes a dead end.

Settings → {{PRODUCT}} legacy URLs sends each old address to the nearest live page — the gig if it still exists, otherwise the venue or the act it was named after — and leaves anything it cannot place as a page that offers a search instead of a shrug.

How to use it

1. Get a list of the old site’s addresses. Your 404 log, or a Search Console export.
2. Paste them into the dry run box. Nothing is redirected — it only tells you where each one would go.
3. Read the list. Look for anything sent somewhere obviously wrong.
4. When you are happy, tick Send old URLs to their match and save.
5. Load one old address in a private browser window to watch it work.

17. Every setting, in one place

18. Every shortcode, in one place

Put these in a page to build whatever layout you want. Attributes in brackets are optional.

Listings

Directories

Tools

19. When something looks wrong

A general rule

When something looks wrong, find out what is actually happening before changing anything. Most of the mistakes that cost real time in building this platform came from believing a plausible explanation instead of checking. The diagnostic tools above exist because of them.