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Vizou Events Manager

The Vizou Events Manager plugin was conceived for my own and my clients’ use (mostly musicians). We needed an easy way to add gigs to our calendars and display them in a variety of ways (upcoming, past, by artist).

This privately developed plugin – not available in the WordPress repository – is based on the conceptual approach of the now-deprecated GigPress plugin (from talented and helpful Canadian developer/musician Derek Hogue). I used and loved it for many years until it was purchased and subsequently phased out by The Events Calendar (Modern Tribe), who offer both a free and a paid Pro version. When GigPress got flagged as containing a security vulnerability, I decided it might be fun to build a similar plugin for my own use. While The Events Calendar is appreciated by many, it was overkill for my clients’ simpler needs. I also had difficulty with The Events Calendar’s GigPress import option – there appears to be a frequently-cited issue with imports hanging or not completing, which was what I experienced after many hours spent trying on different servers and fooling with PHP and memory settings.

As the proverb says, necessity is the mother of invention. Just call me Mom.

Vizou Events Manager was made in Québec over the winter of 2024-25 with the help – as well as some incredibly annoying detours – from claude.ai, who somewhat ironically bears the same name as my humanly-intelligent partner, allowing for some comical discussions about the many hours I was spending with my new “boyfriend”. The learning curve was steep, and I’m still tweaking this project, but so far, it’s working well for my particular needs. I especially love being able to import old GigPress data (thank you, Derek, for making that possible), a feature I added so that my clients and I wouldn’t have to start over from scratch.

Once my plugin is a bit more mature, I plan to add it to my Github repository and make it publicly available to anyone who’d like to use, modify or improve on it.

Vizou Events Manager is dependent upon the very popular free (or Pro) version of the Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) plugin from WP Engine.