The Showtime plugin allows you to easily manage and display a rotating programming schedule. It was originally built for a college radio station, but it could be used for any kind of schedule that repeats weekly.
Showtime takes the current time and displays the name of whatever show/event you’ve placed in the timeslot. If there’s no show/event, it displays a custom off-air message. You also have the option of displaying the name of the upcoming show/event.
Download
Installation
Install and activate the plugin in the super-easy WordPress fashion to which we’ve all become accustomed. You can then either use the Widget to display the current/upcoming show, or the following template tag:
<?php if (function_exists(‘showme_showtime’)) echo showme_showtime(); ?>
To display a your full schedule, broken down into days of the week, you can use the shortcode [showtime-schedule]
Also, be sure to set your timezone city. If you don’t do this first, you’ll have to go back and re-enter all of your timeslots which is a tremendously frustrating waste of time.
Setting your schedule
Once you’ve set your timezone city, you’re ready to start adding items to your schedule. Using the dropboxes and text fields, set your start/end times for a given timeslot, then type in the name you wish to assign it. Be sure to use 24-hour time. Hit Add Showname and Showtime. That’s it; that timeslot and name is now on your schedule.
If you made a mistake in the time, you can delete the timeslot by clicking the “Delete This Timeslot” link helpfully provided next to each entry.
If you made a mistake with the name, you can edit it right there in the schedule. Click the Update Names when you’re done. This will save any and all changes made to the names, so be sure of your changes.
Display Options
Here you can set some options about what Showtime shows your viewers and how it’s displayed. Upcoming Timeslot allows you to toggle whether or not the name and time of the next show/event is displayed underneath the current show/event. The Off-air Message is what is displayed whenever there is no show/event occurring at the moment, or if you’ve hit the Shut It Down button.
The CSS identifies some key elements that you can style to your liking to help fit the look of your site.
Shut it down
If you need to temporarily take your schedule off-line, you can toggle the switch here. In place of your current/upcoming show/event, your Off-air Message will be displayed.
Credits
To clean up the back-end interface, I used the jQuery plugin Tabs, developed by Klaus Hartl. I also bothered Ross Nover with early, inferior versions of this product. His suggestions helped a great deal in making this thing work properly.
That said, please direct questions/praise to carter@outtolunchproductions.com.
