How Cult MTL Built Its Montreal Event Listings on WP Event Manager

The publication had no event platform of its own before it found WP Event Manager. Today its city events section runs on our event management plugin for WordPress, with readers, promoters and venues sending in their own events through a form on the site. The team added the Calendar, Recurring Events and iCal add-ons on top of the free core plugin, and set the whole thing up with help from our developer documentation.

About Cult MTL

Company: Cult MTL, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Industry: Digital and print media, art and culture

Contact: Jeremy Turowetz, Tech Lead

Website: cultmtl.com

Cult MTL writes about Montreal and what goes on in it. It includes coverage of art, music, film, nightlife, food, style, politics, and local business, with writing from an editorial staff working with a group of columnists and freelancers. Readers get interviews with local and touring artists, promoters, and entrepreneurs, along with reviews and opinions from those that know the scene well.

The team is proud of the voice it has built. Jeremy Turowetz, the tech lead, says they stay away from clickbait and put their effort into the depth of culture Montreal actually has. In addition to the articles, Cult MTL assembles a daily To-Do List, organizes the annual Best of MTL readers’ poll and maintains a full list of events taking place in the city.

Why Cult MTL Needed an Events Platform

Those event listings were the part that needed a proper system. A city like Montreal has shows, openings, club nights, and markets going up every day, and no newsroom can type all of them in by hand. It made far more sense to let the people running those events post them directly.

So the brief was simple. The team needed a way to manage user-submitted events, and they were starting from nothing, as they had no event platform in place before. Whatever they picked had to run on their existing WordPress site and be something Jeremy could set up and maintain himself.

Why Cult MTL Choose WP Event Manager

Jeremy found WP Event Manager through a Google search. He read the Reddit thread of other WordPress users talking about the product, and after reading the reviews, the team elected to go with it.

The free core plugin covered the main job straight away. Its frontend event submission form on the frontend lets anyone with an account post an event from the public side of the site. They fill in the event and organizer details, view a preview of the listing, and submit it. Depending on the settings, the listing is published or pending approval. Visitors can then browse the listings and filter down from there.

The deciding factor for a tech lead was how easy the plugin was to work with. Jeremy named our developer documentation as the feature that helped most. With clear docs to work from, he could set the plugin up for Cult MTL without guessing at how it was built.

How WP Event Manager Runs Cult MTL’s City Events Section

The core plugin handles submissions and listings. Three add-ons from our Feature range sit on top of it and take care of dates, repeats, and calendars.

1. Calendar Puts the City’s Events on One Page

A culture site’s readers often just want to see what’s on, and the Calendar add-on is built for that.

Events show in a monthly or yearly view, and each date shows how many events fall on it
Hovering over an event opens a small pop-up with its name, date, time, and image
A shortcode builds a full calendar page of upcoming or past events, with no coding
The calendar can also go in a sidebar, footer, or any other widget area

As a WordPress event calendar plugin, it gives a listings section like Cult MTL’s a second way to browse, next to the regular event list.

2. Recurring Events Saves Organizers From Re-Entering the Same Night

Montreal has plenty of weekly residencies, monthly markets, and regular club nights. Recurring Events means each of those needs to be entered only once.

An event can repeat daily, weekly, monthly or yearly, or on chosen dates
Future dates are created automatically from the original listing
A single date in the series can be moved without touching the rest
Recurrence can be set by the organizer on the front end or by an admin in the dashboard

For a site that depends on outside submissions, this keeps the listings complete without asking promoters to post the same thing every week. It acts as a Recurring Events plugin for WordPress, without any custom code required on the site.

3. iCal Sends Events Straight to Readers’ Calendars

Jeremy listed Google Calendar among the tools the team uses. In WP Event Manager, that connection comes through the iCal add-on.

It creates an ICS file for upcoming events
You can download it from the event page and add it to your Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, or any other calendar app
Once an event is in their Google Calendar, they get Google’s own reminders before it starts

So, a reader who spots a gig in the listings can save it in a couple of clicks and find it waiting in their calendar on the night.

What Changed After Cult MTL Started Using WP Event Manager

Jeremy kept his answer short. Before WP Event Manager, Cult MTL had no event platform at all, and now it has one.

That change is bigger than it sounds for a publication. The events section on cultmtl.com/events now has its own listings page where visitors can search by keyword and location, pick dates and filter by category. Organizers can send in their own events through a submission page, and the listings live on Cult MTL’s own domain, next to the coverage readers already come for. In Jeremy’s words, the team likes the plugin, and the city events section depends on it.

What Other Publishers Can Learn From Cult MTL

Let the community do the data entry since promoters and venues know their own dates better than anyone
Read real user reviews, the way Jeremy did on Reddit, before you commit to a plugin
If you have a developer on the team, check the documentation first, because good docs decide how fast you can build
Add repeating events and calendar downloads early, so weekly nights and save-to-calendar work from the start

Cult MTL’s Suggestion for WP Event Manager

We like to hear where we can do better, so we asked Jeremy for his thoughts. He was happy with the plugin and the developer documentation. His one request was that we test frontend event submissions before releasing updates since that form is what his whole events section is built around.

It’s a fair point, and an important one for sites that rely on reader submissions. We’re thankful Jeremy took the time to raise it, and our team is giving frontend submissions closer attention in testing before each release.

Build Your Own Event Listings on WP Event Manager

If you run a city guide, a magazine or a community site, WP Event Manager can power an event listings website that readers and organizers both add to. The front-end submission form is included in the free core plugin. Later, you can add calendar views, recurring dates, and calendar downloads one add-on at a time, or in a bundle.

We like WP Event Manager, our city events section couldn’t exist without it.