Events Search & Filter Bar for The Events Calendar

Give your visitors a real way to find events instead of scrolling a long event calendar.

Events Search & Filter Bar is a free event search plugin and events filter bar for The Events Calendar. Visitors type an event name, narrow it to a date range, and see matching events on the same page — with a shareable URL for every filtered view.

Front-end event search and filtering is normally a paid feature in the events calendar ecosystem. This event calendar addon gives you a real, working one for free.

An events calendar addon, not another event calendar plugin

This plugin does not replace your WordPress event calendar — it makes the one you already have findable. If you run The Events Calendar to manage events, conferences, webinars, workshops, classes, gigs or local meetups, and your events page has grown into a long list, this adds the search and filtering layer that list is missing.

It works on any WordPress site running The Events Calendar (free or Pro), with any theme, and with the block editor, Elementor, Divi, Beaver Builder, Bricks and WPBakery — because the bar is placed with a simple shortcode.

What you get, free

• Event search that runs on the server. Keyword search matches the event title, paginated and bounded — your event catalogue is never dumped into the browser.
• Type-ahead event suggestions. Instant results as visitors type, in a keyboard-driven dropdown — and, when the bar has a results list to hand them to, a “See all results” row that takes them there.
• A date filter with presets. Today, Tomorrow, This weekend, This week, Next week, This month, Next month — or a custom date range. Multi-day and recurring events are matched correctly, in your site’s timezone.
• Filtered event lists on the same page. Place the results region where you want it and the bar drives it — event count, active-filter chips, Load more, and helpful empty states that offer a way out (“Clear search”, “Search past events too”, “Browse past events”).
• Events grid or events list, the visitor’s choice. Pick the default; visitors can flip between the two from the results toolbar, and re-sort — soonest first, latest first, or by title.
• Event cards you control. Show or hide the image, title, date, venue and cost, set the number of columns and the card scale, and choose how the event date reads.
• Shareable, bookmarkable URLs. Every search, date range, sort and page is in the address bar, so a filtered event view can be linked, shared and crawled — and the browser’s back and forward buttons behave.
• Put your search bar on the default events page. On The Events Calendar’s List view, swap out its search box, its List/Month/Day links and its date navigation, and put your bar there instead. It keeps rendering its own event results — your search and date filter drive them.
• Add a heading to the events page. The events archive is not a normal WordPress page, so there is nowhere obvious to title it. Type one line and it appears above the bar; leave it blank and nothing changes.
• Make it match your site. Accent, text and background colours (six ready-made palettes, including two dark ones), two bar frames, six search-button treatments, a control-size scale and a corner-radius slider. A theme-proof control reset keeps the bar clean on themes that restyle every input.
• Accessible by design. A proper combobox/listbox keyboard pattern, focus that never leaves the input while arrowing through suggestions, polite screen-reader announcements — and a plain form fallback that still searches with JavaScript switched off.
• Light on your site. Event queries are cached, public requests are rate-limited, and the CSS and JS load only on pages that actually render a bar.

Add the event search bar with a shortcode

Drop this on any page, post or widget area:

[events-calendar-search]

Out of the box that’s an event search box with type-ahead suggestions. Turn on the date filter and a results region in the settings panel, and the panel writes the shortcodes for you — including the second tag that marks where the filtered event list appears:

[events-calendar-search facets="search,date" results-mode="inline" target="events"]
[events-calendar-search-results target="events"]

You never have to type either by hand. Design the bar in the panel, then copy both tags with one click.

Shortcode attributes

Every attribute below is optional. Leave one out and it inherits your saved setting, so a bare [events-calendar-search] follows the settings panel and you only add an attribute where one placement should differ.

Read the full description on the official page →