• Installation
• Upgrading
• Using GigPress
  • Sidebar widget
  • Template tags
  • Styling the output
• hCalendar details

Installation

After downloading, unzip the gigpress.zip file on your computer, then upload the gigpress folder to the wp-content/plugins directory on your web server using an FTP client application.

Once the gigpress folder has been uploaded, a listing for GigPress should then appear on the Plugins page in your WordPress administration panel. Upon activation, there will be a new top-level menu in the WordPress admin called GigPress. Click on that link to get started.

Upgrading from an earlier version

1. Deactivate GigPress on the Plugins page of your WordPress administration panel.
2. Delete the gigpress folder from your /wp-content/plugins/ directory.
3. Upload the new gigpress folder to your /wp-content/plugins/ directory.
4. Activate GigPress on the Plugins page of your WordPress administration panel.

Using GigPress

Adding and managing shows and tours using the GigPress admin is very straightforward, and instructions are provided inline on each screen.

Sidebar Widget

GigPress includes a widget for listing upcoming shows in the sidebar of your widget-enabled WordPress theme. To add the GigPress widget, simply visit the Widgets screen in your WordPress admin (found under the Presentation tab), and drag the box labelled GigPress to the widget area.

Options for the GigPress widget (title of the widget, number of items to show, and whether you’d like your listing split up into tours or not) are set on the main GigPress Options page.

Template tags

The two main Gigpress functions you’ll use — those to display a full list of upcoming shows, and to display past shows — are called using an inline-replaced pseudo-tag (I just made that phrase up!) This is convenient, as you don’t have to add anything to your templates - just type the following into your page content (or post content) to display upcoming shows:

[gigpress_upcoming]

Likewise, type this into your page content (or post content) to display past shows:

[gigpress_archive]

Both of these functions can also be used within a page template, simply by inserting either <? gigpress_upcoming(); > or <? gigpress_archive(); > at the appropriate location in your template.

If your theme isn’t widget-enabled, or if you don’t want to use the widget for whatever reason, you can access the upcoming shows list for your sidebar by using the gigpress_sidebar() function. Simply insert this into your sidebar template wherever you’d like the list to appear:

<?php gigpress_sidebar($number,$segment); ?>

Replace $number with the number of shows you’d like to display (the default is 3). This function outputs an unordered list of shows occurring on or after today’s date.

The $segment option specifies whether you’d like each tour to be listed seperately (display the specified number of shows per tour, with an additional list of individual shows if there are any that are not part of a tour), or if you’d like to display only the specified number of upcoming shows, unrelated to their tour pairing. (The default is 1, which segments your shows by tour.)

How you preface the list is entirely up to you — for example, if your sidebar used the h2 element for headings, and you wanted to call the list “Our next few shows,” listing 3 shows, and not segmented by tour, you’d add this to your template:

<h2>Our next few shows</h2>

<?php gigpress_sidebar(3,0); ?>

Alternately, if your sidebar used the h4 element for headings, and you wanted to list 10 upcoming shows for each tour that’s active in your database, you’d add this to your template:

<h4>Current tours</h4>

<?php gigpress_sidebar(10,1); ?>

Styling the output

All markup output by GigPress is XHTML-compliant and classed to the gills to allow easy styling with CSS. GigPress includes a default style sheet that will likely suit most users. If you’d like to further customize the display using CSS, simply duplicate the gigpress.css style sheet located in the gigpress directory, and upload it to your current theme directory. GigPress will load this style sheet automatically, and any rules you change in this copy will override the default styles.

The style sheet is well-commented so as to ease the process of customizing it, and a simple View source when viewing your pages displaying GigPress output will show you how the markup is structured.

hCalendar details

Additional classes are applied to the output in order to turn each show into an hCalendar event. Although you may use these for formatting, they primarily serve to structure data for hCalendar detectors, such as the Operator add-on for Firefox. These data detectors allow users to add events to their Google, iCal, and other calendars quickly and easily.

GigPress maps the following fields to corresponding properties in the hCalendar specification: