Thread

All-

Back, developing a new site and yay EE seems to be the way to go.

Quick question — on the site coming up, there are many entry types where dates will be important, but in different ways, like one channel type will be for events, which can span multiple dates, etc…and some of this functionality will be implemented using the standard entry date / expire date fields.

To ease the user burden here, I’d like to:

* Give users instructions on the date fields, since they’ll forget what does whay
* Maybe even move the date fields into the standard list of elements instead of their own tab (where users sometimes forget about them)

Is there an extension/plugin that anyone knows of that does that, I didn’t seem to see a hook in the EE2 hooks list that would let me modify the display of these fields, but i could be wrong, having not developed an extension that uses the hooks before.

Thanks in advance!
-matt

There’s always the option of using an addon and/or custom date fields for the actual event dates, this leaves the standard Entry/Expiration dates for controlling when the entry is active.

http://devot-ee.com/search/results/search&keywords=date&channel=addons&addon_version_support=ee2/ has a good list of addons that may help.

* Give users instructions on the date fields, since they’ll forget what does whay

As for instructions on the date fields as they are built-in standard fields for every install of ExpressionEngine and not custom fields (either 1st party or 3rd party) then you unfortunately can’t add instructions in the same way that you would for a custom field.

There is one add-on over on devot-ee.com for 2.x called Heelp which might be of use here. There were a few add-ons for 1.x that used to allow you to have a custom field which just placed some text on the page instead of showing a field which I’m not sure if any have been converted across for 2.x use though.

* Maybe even move the date fields into the standard list of elements instead of their own tab (where users sometimes forget about them)

The fields can be moved into the standard Publish tab by use of a publish layout. You can find more information about that here - http://ellislab.com/expressionengine/user-guide/cp/content/publish_page_layouts.html

I also just made a very quick screen-cast to show how this works too - http://cl.ly/9ebt

Hope that helps a bit.

Best wishes,

Mark

Hi Matt,

Does Rob and Mark’s helpful advice answer everything for you?