How to manually add, delete, and edit events in Bolt CMS
Written by Abby Reilly
Updated at April 24th, 2024
Table of Contents
Event cards allow you to highlight upcoming events with information about date, time and location. There might be a need for you to manually manage event cards outside of your feed. All of what appears on the card can be controlled in Express, or can be mapped via an automated feed.
How to manually add events in Bolt CMS
If you navigate to your right-hand menu and go to Content > Event Cards you should see a button at the top that says “Add Event Card".
If you click the button you should be presented with a blank event card template:
The event card should be filled out completely. You can use the text editor to enter your event information and format the text.
You should save throughout your progress! (The “Save” button is found in the Publish box at the top right of the template. If you save and navigate away from your progress, you will see an event listed as “DRAFT” in your feed so you know it is not live.)
You should also check off the relevant tags (or add new tags, if necessary). There could be section, collection and/or other kinds of tag boxes available. Make sure you fill out everything that is applicable.
Additionally, there are a few options that would normally be filled out automatically by your feed, but with a manual update will need to be managed.
Timeline options: there are several boxes for you to control how your content is seen and interacted with by app users. Options include:
- Kicker: The kicker will appear as a highlighted banner above the card on the timeline. You can enter any text to appear there.
- Pin to top: Will pin a card to the top of its timeline.
- Disable sharing: Will remove the sharing option for users.
- Enable commercial banners: Adds a banner to let app uses know that they are reading a sponsored card.
- Hide from timeline: If you don't want content to appear in your live timeline, but need a card so you can create a deep link.
- Free sample: if you want this card to be excluded from your paywall.
- Note: Your settings on your timeline must allow for content to be shared for free. Otherwise, this setting will not stick.
- Hide publication date: You can click this to hide the publication date from app users.
When you are ready to publish, press “Publish”.
Handling dates and times
Event cards start and end times are well-formed ISO8601 date-times which include the offset from GMT of the zone the event is happening in. E.g. WWDC starts at 2022-06-06T09:00:00-07:00
Currently we ALWAYS display the event time in the user/device’s timezone. E.g. assuming BST, WWDC’s start will be shown as “6 June at 5 PM”.
Important note: 2022-06-06T09:00:00-04:00 implies the event is happening at 9:00 New York time and is happening IN New York. While 2022-06-06T05:00:00-09:00 is happening at 5:00 on the West Coast even if the events are happening at the same.
Going forward we want to display event times in the user/device’s time zone ALWAYS (as now) and IF AND ONLY IF a zone label string is provided AND the date-time components are different in the event’s timezone, additionally show the “event’s local time”
E.g. assuming BST AND a zone label string of “PST”, WWDC would show as “6 June at 5 PM (6 June at 9 AM PST)” (or something like this, exact format TBD)
Virtual events for which there is no local timezone, can omit the zone label string, and will always be shown only in the user/device’s zone.
Video Tutorial: How to add event cards
How to manually delete events in Bolt CMS
This follows the standard deletion SOP for other types of content cards.
From inside the card, go to the right-hand Publish box. There is an option to “Move to Bin”. If you click that option, your card will be deleted.
You can also delete items by hovering over the card from the complete list of event cards in the main event card screen. A menu will appear with “Bin” as an option. Click “Bin” to delete.
Events can be removed in bulk from your feed. On your page with all your listed events, if you select the cards to be deleted and then select “Move to Bin” from the Bulk Action dropdown, you will delete all the selected event cards.
Under the event feed page, there will be a link to “Bin”, which is where trashed events live. On the Bin page, you can select to permanently delete something or restore.
Replacing Deleted Items from Your Feed
if you want to publish a new version of an event from your feed, but a previous version still is in your Bin, the event will not be published (since the feed will think it is a duplicate event). You need to permanently delete the old event for the updated event to publish from your feed. You can also select ‘Empty bin” to permanently delete all items in the bin.
Video Tutorial: How to delete an event
Video Tutorial: How to restore an event card
How to edit events in Bolt CMS
If you want to make edits directly to an event card and not wait for a feed update, you can click into a card and select “Manual Editing”. This must be done first. Any changes made to the event card will be overwritten by the feed content if this box is not checked.
Once you have selected the manual edit button, you can make edits and save/publish your changes.
You also have the option to change an event's status from “Published” to “Draft”. This will pull an event from your feed immediately if you need to make urgent changes. You can then change the status back to “Published” when the event card is completed.
Video Tutorial: How to manually edit an already published event card