Meridian Events Calendar
1 · Install it
In your WordPress admin, go to Plugins → Add New, search for Meridian Events Calendar, and press Install, then Activate. That is the whole installation. It needs WordPress and PHP no older than the versions listed on the directory page; if your site is older than that, the plugin tells you so in a notice and refuses to load rather than taking your site down with it.
2 · Set the site timezone first
Before you create anything, go to Settings → General and check that Timezone is set to a named city — Europe/Copenhagen, America/New_York — and not to a fixed offset like UTC+1. This matters more than it looks. A named zone knows when your country changes its clocks; a fixed offset does not, so every event you create after the next clock change will be an hour out. Most sites showing wrong event times are wrong for exactly this reason, and it is a thirty-second fix.
More on why that one setting causes so much trouble →
3 · Create your first event
A new Events menu appears. Add an event the way you would add a post: title, description, featured image. In the event box you set the date, the start time as it appears on the wall clock, how long it runs, and — if it differs from your site's default — its own timezone. A touring show that plays one night in another country gets that country's zone on that one event.
Note that you set a length, not an end time. That is what keeps a two-hour event two hours long on the night the clocks change instead of one hour or three.
4 · Make it repeat
In the same box, turn on repetition and describe the pattern: every week, every second Tuesday, the last Friday of the month, twelve times, until a date. The plugin stores that as one rule on one event and works out the dates when a page is drawn. It never creates a post per occurrence, so a weekly class running for two years stays one entry in your Events list instead of 104.
If you want to see the dates a rule produces before you commit to it, the expander on this site is the same engine the plugin uses.
5 · Cancel or move a single occurrence
Open the occurrence from the event's list of dates and cancel it, move it, or give it a different title. Only that one changes. The rest of the series keeps its dates and its links, which is the behaviour people expect and rarely get.
6 · Put it on a page
In the block editor, add the Events calendar block — it is under Widgets in the inserter — and choose a month grid or a list. In a classic editor, a widget area or a page builder, use the shortcode instead: [meridian_events] on its own, or with options, [meridian_events view="month" days="90" category="concerts"]. The same attributes are listed on the plugin's settings screen.
The plugin does no work at all on pages that do not contain the calendar. If you open your front page with Query Monitor running, you should see two autoloaded options from us and no queries. That is the intended result, and it is worth checking on your own site.
7 · Let people subscribe
Each event gets add-to-calendar links, and the calendar as a whole publishes an outgoing iCal feed at /meridian-calendar.ics on your own domain. A regular at your venue can subscribe once in their own phone and get every future date, including changes — which is a better outcome than them checking your page each week.
Then, if your events live somewhere else
Everything above is free and stays free. Pro is the answer to a different problem: your schedule is already maintained in Google Calendar, Outlook or Teamup, and you do not want to keep it in two places. Pro subscribes to that calendar's .ics address and keeps the site in step — no API key, no OAuth screen, no account with us. See the pricing →