How to handle exceptions to your regular meeting schedule

When you have your regular meeting schedule set up in the RSVPMaker system, with agendas for upcoming meetings projected out weeks or months in advance, what happens when you need to notify website visitors that you are NOT meeting on a given date.

Here is how I handle that situation at my clubs. First, if you won’t be meeting on a given date, you should delete that event post so no one will sign up to speak or register as a guest for that date.

If you go into the RSVP Events menu on the dashboard, and hover your mouse over the date you want to remove, you’ll see Trash as one of the links that appears under the event title. Click to delete that event from your website’s calendar of events.

Now, suppose you want to add a notice explaining why you are not meeting for one or more dates. Perhaps your event falls on a holiday, or your meeting space will be unavailable.

RSVPMaker provides a WordPress content block called Limited Time Content that you can use as a wrapper around content that should expire after a given date. In this case, I want the notice to be displayed until April 1 at noon.

I’m going to add that notice on my home page right above the widget that displays upcoming meeting dates guests can RSVP for.

Once you have inserted the block, you can add one or more content blocks that will expire from the site after the end date and time that you set. I’m showing a single paragraph within the Limited Time Content block, but I could also include a headline or an image, or whatever you want.

The gray border that appears above and below your content will not actually be displayed on the front end — it’s there so you can click on the border to select the “wrapper” block rather than its contents. You can then use the controls in the block properties sidebar to set the expiration date and time. Optionally, you can also set a start date (before which the content will not be displayed).

This is how you can set a message to display when it’s relevant but not linger on your home page after the date is past.