Events give a website a reason for people to come back, community building, marketing content, and a direct line to your audience all in one feature. WP Event Manager is one of the more established plugins for adding that to WordPress. Active, v3.4.1, updated within the last week, 1 million+ total downloads.
What Is WP Event Manager?
A free core plugin for creating, editing, and promoting events, with calendar views, categories, and search built in. Compatible with most themes and responsive by default.
Key Features
- Event listings with a clean, organized display
- Calendar view
- Advanced search with categories and tags
- Frontend event submission
- Customizable event pages
- Google Maps integration (paid add-on)
- Event registration and ticketing (via add-ons)
- Widgets and shortcodes
Advanced Search
Filters by date, location, and keyword, with categories grouping events by theme and tags adding finer-grained filtering underneath.
Frontend Event Submission
Organizers submit and manage events directly from the site’s frontend, no dashboard access required, useful if you want members or non-admin contributors adding their own events.
Customizable Event Pages
Add images, video, and detailed descriptions per event page, giving each listing its own presentation rather than a generic template.
Google Maps Integration
Embeds a map directly into event listings for venue location. This is a paid add-on, not part of the free core plugin.
Event Registration and Ticketing
Depending on which add-ons you install, attendees can register or purchase tickets through a frontend form, covering both offline and online events.
Widgets, Shortcodes, and the Event Dashboard
The setup wizard generates standard pages with their shortcodes pre-filled, click “Create selected pages” and they’re ready to use. The Event Dashboard shortcode gives users a frontend page to manage events they’ve already submitted.
With the BuddyX Theme
WP Event Manager works cleanly with BuddyX, event listings inherit BuddyX’s design system rather than clashing with it, useful if events are one piece of a broader community site rather than the whole point of it.
An Alternative Worth Knowing
If you’re evaluating options rather than committed to WP Event Manager specifically, Eventonomy is a newer, actively developed community-events plugin with unlimited events and attendees, RSVPs with waitlists, recurring series, and multiple calendar views free in its core, plus an optional paid tier for ticketing through Stripe, PayPal, Square, Mollie, or WooCommerce with no per-ticket platform fees. Different product, different developer (Wbcom Designs), genuinely worth a look alongside WP Event Manager rather than instead of it.
Summary
WP Event Manager covers the core of event management well: listings, calendar view, frontend submission, and a dashboard for organizers, all free. Maps, advanced ticketing, and some registration features require paid add-ons, so budget for those if you need them beyond the basics.