EventON Archive

A cached, crawlable archive of every published EventON event, grouped by year and month, so past events stop being invisible to search engines.

Why

EventON hides past events from crawlers three separate ways, and they compound:

1. evcal_cal_hide_past, a global setting, drops every past event from every calendar. Enforced in class-calendar_generator.php at if ( ! $_is_in_visible_range ) continue;. No shortcode attribute overrides it: not event_past_future, not hide_past, not month_incre, not focus_start_date_range.
2. evo_settings_query_type, another global, adds a date_query on post_date_gmt, so a rolling window is the only thing the calendar can query at all. It filters on when the post was created, not on the event date.
3. The yearly view loads over AJAX, so its initial HTML contains no event rows.

On the site this was written for, that left 373 orphan event pages: present in the sitemap, linked from nothing, reachable by nobody. Turning both globals off fixes the calendars for humans, but an EventON list of 400 events renders roughly 27 KB of markup per event, about 10 MB on one page, because it emits a full event card per row.

This plugin answers the crawler's question instead of the visitor's: one page, one anchor per event, roughly 45 KB for 400 events. It reads event dates straight from post meta, so it is immune to all three mechanisms whether they are on or off.

Features

• Every published event as a plain <a href>, grouped by year then month, with year jump links
• Optional totals strip with count-up animation: all events, one figure per event family, and members-only
• Never lists membership-gated events, and says how many exist instead
• Cached to a non-autoloaded option; rebuilt daily, five minutes after any event edit, or on demand
• Block and shortcode, sharing one renderer and one cache
• Headings, lists and anchors only. No wrappers to fight, no inline styles, no JSON-LD
• No npm, no Composer, no build step, nothing to configure beyond the block options

Requirements

• WordPress 6.5+
• PHP 8.0+
• EventON installed and active
• ARMember optional. When present, gated events are excluded and counted separately

Installation

Upload the zip in Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin, or clone into wp-content/plugins/eventon_archive/. Activation schedules the daily rebuild.

Then add the archive to a page and link that page from your footer or a menu, or the archive is itself an orphan and the whole exercise is pointless.

Usage

Block editor. Insert the EventON Archive block. Options live in the sidebar. It is server-rendered, so it also works inside Site Editor templates and template parts.

Shortcode. [eventon_archive] in page or post content.

Both take the same options and share the same cache.

Attribute	Default	Effect
order	desc	desc newest year first, asc oldest first
show	all	all, past, or future
location	no	Append the venue name after each title
category	no	Append the event family, e.g. "Bike Night"
counters	no	Totals strip above the list
nav	yes	Year jump links at the top. Ignored when group is no, since the links target the year headings
family	every family	Limit to one event family. Accepts the name (Bike Night) or the taxonomy slug (event_type_2)
venue	every venue	Limit to one location. Accepts the name (Buttonwillow Raceway Park) or the event_location term slug (buttonwillow-raceway-park)
limit	0	Most events to list. 0 is no cap
group	yes	Year and month headings. no gives one flat list with the year on every row

Default order is desc because the point of the page is surfacing past events, and the recent past is the part anyone actually wants.

One family, a few rows: the hub-page case

The whole-archive view answers a crawler. A page about one kind of event wants a short, current list of that kind, which is what family plus limit plus group="no" gives:

[eventon_archive family="Bike Night" show="future" order="asc"  limit="5" group="no" nav="no"]
[eventon_archive family="Bike Night" show="past"   order="desc" limit="6" group="no" nav="no"]

That replaces the hand-written "coming up" and "recently" lists these pages otherwise accumulate, which are wrong within weeks and silently stay wrong.

family is a taxonomy, not a term. EventON registers one taxonomy per activated event-type slot and the taxonomy is the family; its terms are the venues and sub-types underneath. So family takes event_type_2, or equivalently Bike Night, or Bike Night Categories, all case-insensitively. In the block editor it is a dropdown of the families this site actually has, by name.

Asking for a family that does not exist lists nothing and leaves the reason in an HTML comment. Listing everything instead would mean one typo silently turning a hub page into a copy of the full archive.

One venue: the circuit and bar pages

A page about a place wants the same treatment a family hub gets, and venue is the term-level equivalent of family:

[eventon_archive venue="Buttonwillow Raceway Park" show="past" order="desc" group="no" nav="no"]

DROC has run [eventon_archive_count venue="Buttonwillow Raceway Park" format="plain"] days at this circuit.

venue filters, location prints. They read almost the same and do unrelated jobs: location="yes" appends the venue name after each title, venue="…" decides which events appear at all. Setting one never implies the other.

venue is a term, not a taxonomy, which is the opposite of family. It matches event_location terms, and an event carrying more than one location term matches on any of them, so a ride listing both a meetup point and a destination still appears on its destination's page.

Asking for a venue that does not exist lists nothing and leaves the reason in an HTML comment, for the same reason as family: a typo must not turn a venue page into a copy of the whole archive.

limit never reaches the counters. They describe the window, so counters="yes" limit="5" correctly shows "119 Bike Night" above a five-row list. Same principle as members-only events being counted but not listed.

Order matters more than it looks with show="future". The default desc plus a cap gives you the events furthest away, not the next few. Pass order="asc".

One figure in a sentence

DROC has run [eventon_archive_count family="Bike Night"] bike nights since 2018.

Reads the same tallies as the counters strip, from the same cache, so a number in prose and a number in the strip cannot drift apart.

Attribute	Default	Effect
family	every family	As above
venue	every venue	As above
show	all	all, past, or future
of	total	total counts everything in the window, members-only included. listed counts what the archive may show. members_only counts what is withheld
format	html	html wraps the number in a <span class="eventon-archive-count">. plain returns bare digits, for use inside an attribute

No block for this one: it belongs mid-paragraph, where a shortcode expands and a block does not. Like any shortcode it does not expand in Site Editor templates.

For code, EventON_Archive_Builder::counts( [ 'family' => 'event_type_2', 'show' => 'past' ] ) returns total, listed, members_only, families and the resolved family.

What it renders

<div class="eventon-archive">
  <div class="eventon-archive__stats">…counters…</div>
  <nav class="eventon-archive__nav">…year jump links…</nav>
  <h2 id="eventon-archive-2026">2026</h2>
  <h3>July</h3>
  <ul class="eventon-archive__list">
    <li><time datetime="2026-07-18">Jul 18</time> <a href="…">Event title</a></li>
  </ul>
</div>

The theme supplies typography, colour and spacing. The bundled stylesheet is about seventy lines and only exists to strip the list bullets, align the dates, and lay out the counters. Disable it with add_filter( 'eventon_archive_load_styles', '__return_false' );.

No JSON-LD, deliberately. Event pages already emit their own Event schema, and EventON's emitter is fragile enough without a second one to keep valid.

What it never lists

Reason	Signal
Membership-gated	ARMember arm_access_plan post meta, or an ARMember-protected term
EventON members-only	_onlyloggedin meta
Author excluded it	evo_exclude_ev meta
Password protected	post_password

Anything not publish is out by definition.

The ARMember check defers to droc_is_arm_restricted() when DROC Noindex Restricted is active, so both plugins always agree on what "restricted" means, and falls back to reading ARMember's meta directly.

The check is deliberately viewer-independent. The cache is generated once, often by cron running as an administrator, and served to everyone, so "can the current user see this" would be exactly the wrong question.

Counters

   435       181         147           38            75             59
  EVENTS     RIDE     BIKE NIGHT   TRACK DAY  MOTOGP WATCH PARTY  MEMBERS ONLY

Counting is per taxonomy, not per term. EventON registers one taxonomy per activated event-type slot: event_type, event_type_2, event_type_3, event_type_4. The taxonomy is the category; its terms are the venue or sub-type underneath (Chuckwalla, MotoDoffo, Short ride), which mostly duplicate the location column. Family names come from each taxonomy's menu_name label, so renaming an event type in EventON relabels the counter. Order follows EventON's slot order, so it does not reshuffle between rebuilds. Override the set with eventon_archive_taxonomies.

An event counts toward a family if it has at least one term in that taxonomy, and it can count toward more than one.

The counters include members-only events; the list does not. An archive claiming "38 track days" while quietly omitting the members-only ones under-reports what the club actually did. The separate Members only figure says how many are withheld from the list below.

show and family define the window the counters describe; limit does not. With family="Bike Night" the total is the bike-night count, so the strip drops the per-family row and labels the total with the family name instead of restating one number under two headings.

Any figure that would render as zero is dropped, including one added through the eventon_archive_counters filter. A counter reading 0 draws the eye to say nothing.

The real figures are server-rendered. assets/eventon-archive-counters.js only winds them back to about 15% and runs them forward again, easing out over 1.1s, triggered by an IntersectionObserver when the strip scrolls into view. Crawlers, no-JS readers, and anyone with prefers-reduced-motion: reduce see the true number, and if the script fails to load nothing is lost. Digits use tabular-nums and the element's width is locked before the first frame, so nothing reflows while it counts.

Caching

Rendered HTML lives in the eventon_archive_cache option, autoload off, keyed by a hash of the attributes so several variants coexist (capped at 24, raise or lower with eventon_archive_max_variants). The cap is 24 rather than a handful because two lists on each event-family hub page is two variants per hub.

Counter tallies are cached alongside the HTML under their own key, hashed from family and show alone. Every page asking about the same window therefore shares one tally, whatever it does with limit or the presentation options.

Only the unfiltered whole-archive view writes the "Events listed" figure on the settings screen. A family or limit render describes a subset, and letting it write that figure would leave the screen reporting "5 events" for the entire site.

Rebuilt daily at 03:20 local, five minutes after any event is saved, trashed or deleted (debounced, so a bulk edit rebuilds once rather than once per post), and on demand from Settings → EventON Archive. Cron discards the cache and immediately re-warms the default view, so the first visitor after a rebuild never pays for the query.

Filters

Filter	Purpose
eventon_archive_query_args	Adjust the WP_Query used to collect events
eventon_archive_events	Modify the collected rows before rendering
eventon_archive_exclude_event	Override the per-event exclusion decision
eventon_archive_taxonomies	Override the event-type taxonomies treated as families
eventon_archive_counters	Add, remove or relabel counter figures
eventon_archive_rebuild_delay	Seconds to wait after an edit before rebuilding (minimum 60)
eventon_archive_load_styles	Return false to skip the bundled stylesheet