Events often take place over multiple times or locations, and that’s where Sessions come in. A session represents a single instance of the event happening at a specific time and place. It's in the session where you define the start and end date/times for your gathering, rather than on the event element itself.
For example, if you’re hosting a three-day conference, each day could be a separate session. Or, if you have multiple performances of a play, each performance would be a different session.
A session’s title is automatically generated based on your Event Type’s Session Title Format setting.
Every session requires a Start Date and End Date. These dates control when the session begins and ends. They’re separate from the event itself, allowing you to define multiple occurrences under one event. For example, each session of a multi-day event will have its own specific dates.
If your session doesn’t need specific start and end times, and is simply running all day, you can enable the All Day option. When this is checked, the start and end times are removed, and the session is considered an all-day event.
This is useful for events that span an entire day without specific time slots, such as open festivals or exhibitions.
Sessions can also occur on a recurring basis, which is where the Frequency setting comes into play. It's only available when you first create a session!
You can set a session to happen:
These recurrence rules define how the session repeats over time, allowing you to easily manage events that happen more than once. Based on your selected frequency, individual sessions are automatically generated to match your recurrence settings.
You can even register custom recurrence rules to extend this functionality.
The Daily option allows you to repeat a session every few days, giving you control over how many days apart each occurrence should be.
The Weekly option provides flexibility for sessions that repeat on specific days of the week. You can control how many weeks to skip between occurrences and which days of the week the session should take place.
The Monthly option is perfect for events that repeat on a monthly basis. You can choose how many months to skip between occurrences, and whether the session should occur on a specific date or a specific weekday within the month.
When managing a recurring session, you may need to make changes that affect one or more occurrences. The plugin allows you to control which instances are updated or deleted when you make changes:
This ensures you can fine-tune your recurring events without impacting sessions you don’t want to change, and without the hassle of editing sessions one-by-one.