Showing only one recurring event

Some event calendar plugins do recurring events by creating many posts. That’s fine until those cloned posts fill up your search results. This function will only show one of each post with the same title and will take the one with the first date.

The date is checked from _EventStartDate custom field, but it’s easy to change the function to look at the post publication date or something else.

Add this to your site:

add_filter( 'relevanssi_hits_filter', 'rlv_cull_recurring_events' ); 
function rlv_cull_recurring_events( $hits ) { 
  $ok_results     = array(); 
  $posts_seen     = array(); 
  $index_by_title = array(); 
  $date_by_title  = array(); 
  $i = 0; 
  foreach ( $hits[0] as $hit ) { 
    if ( ! isset( $posts_seen[ $hit->post_title ] ) ) { 
      $ok_results[]                       = $hit; 
      $date_by_title[ $hit->post_title ]  = get_post_meta( $hit->ID, '_EventStartDate', true ); 
      $index_by_title[ $hit->post_title ] = $i; 
      $posts_seen[ $hit->post_title ]     = true; 
      $i++; 
   } else { 
      if ( get_post_meta( $hit->ID, '_EventStartDate', true ) < $date_by_title[ $hit->post_title ] ) { 
        if ( strtotime( get_post_meta( $hit->ID, '_EventStartDate', true ) ) < time() ) {
          continue; // Skips events that are in the past.
        }
        $date_by_title[ $hit->post_title ]                 = get_post_meta( $hit->ID, '_EventStartDate', true ); 
        $ok_results[ $index_by_title[ $hit->post_title ] ] = $hit;
      } 
    } 
  } 
  $hits[0] = $ok_results;
  return $hits;
}

Update 27.10.2017: Fixed the function to remove an “Undefined index” error and added a check for skipping events in the past.

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2 comments

I’m using the Modern Tribe events plugin on several of my sites. Is there a way to alter this function to just exclude all past events from search altogether? It’s starting to become a real headache.

Mikko Saari says:

September 26, 2017 at 8:47 pm

Yes, it’s possible. I don’t know how Modern Tribe stores the dates, but it shouldn’t be difficult to create a filter to exclude all past events. It would be simpler than this: inside the foreach loop, just check the date, and if it’s in the past, skip the post.

Reply

2 comments Showing only one recurring event

Caroline says:

September 26, 2017 at 8:03 pm

I’m using the Modern Tribe events plugin on several of my sites. Is there a way to alter this function to just exclude all past events from search altogether? It’s starting to become a real headache.

1. Mikko Saari says:
  
  September 26, 2017 at 8:47 pm
  
  Yes, it’s possible. I don’t know how Modern Tribe stores the dates, but it shouldn’t be difficult to create a filter to exclude all past events. It would be simpler than this: inside the foreach loop, just check the date, and if it’s in the past, skip the post.