Views & options

One calendar, three ways to read it. Every view takes the same four options, so you can switch a page from a month grid to a list by changing a single word.

The three views

• Month (the default) – a full month grid with today marked. Answers “what is on this month”.
• Week – a seven-day strip starting on Monday. Answers “what is on this week”.
• List – upcoming events in date order, each with its featured image, date box, venue and a ticket link. Answers “what is next”.

Visitors are not locked into your choice: the calendar header carries a month / week / list switch, so your setting is simply where they start.

The four options

• view – month (default), week or list.
• category – one or more event category slugs, comma separated. Empty means every category.
• show_past – no by default, so only upcoming dates appear. Set it to yes to include dates that have already happened.
• max_events – 12 by default. This one does two different jobs, on purpose – see below.

max_events means two things

In the list view it is a global cap: the list shows the first N upcoming events and stops.

In the month and week grids the same number is a per-day cap. A global cap in a grid would blank out the rest of the month once it was reached, so instead every day shows at most N events plus a “+N more” toggle that expands the cell in place. A busy Saturday never pushes Sunday off the calendar.

Setting max_events="0" removes the configured cap. In the list view that means no limit at all; in the grids, dense days fall back to three visible events plus the same toggle, so a day with forty events still fits in its cell.

The category filter

Above the grid sits a dropdown built from your own event categories, with an All option. It matters even when you have set category yourself: picking All widens the calendar past the configured category, so a page built for one strand of your programme can still show everything on request. Leave the dropdown alone and your configured category applies.

Past events

By default anything already finished is dropped, which is what a public “what is on” page wants. Turn show_past on for an archive page – a season retrospective, or a venue history – and past dates appear alongside the upcoming ones.