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Modifying the Home Page

There are some items on the home page that need attention:

The Concert Poster in the home page slider will need replacing.

The concert poster from the previous semester needs to be replaced. At the start of the semester, we don’t yet have a poster design, so we usually use a temporary substitute. We’ve used Canva to create such a poster.

Here’s a view of the home page slider:

The slider is implemented using the Depicter plugin. Go into the website’s WordPress Dashboard, locate the Depicter item, then go to the Depicter dashboard, and locate:

Click on “Home Page Main Slider” and you’ll see:

You’ll have to learn enough about how to use Depicter to replace the concert poster image

Home Page Calendar-related Items

Below the home page slider is a bar that looks like this:

There is no need to worry about the center item. That is an icon linked to the SVC Calendar page.

Next Rehearsal

The Next Rehearsal item shows the date of the next rehearsal. It is implemented using a custom-written ‘shortcode’ in the Snippets plugin.

Every semester, the code here has to be updated for the semester schedule. Go to the website Dashboard>Snippets item, click on the ‘Shortcode [svc_add_rehearsal_date] to provide Next Rehearsal Date‘ snippet, where you will see code something like this:

function next_rehearsal_date($atts)
{
	$todaysdate=time();
	$startdate=strtotime("Tuesday January 13 2026");
	$enddate=strtotime("Tuesday May 5 2026");

	$tuesdaydate=$startdate;
	/* If we're in the semester... */
	if ($todaysdate >= $startdate && $todaysdate <= $enddate)
	{
	  $tuesdaydate=strtotime("next Tuesday");
	  if (date('D', $todaysdate) === 'Tue')
		  $tuesdaydate=strtotime("today");
	  return "Next Rehearsal: " . date("m/d/Y", $tuesdaydate);
	}
	else /* If we're before the semester */
	if ($todaysdate < $startdate)
	{
	  return "Next Rehearsal: " . date("m/d/Y", $startdate);
	}
	else /* Otherwise */
	{
	  return "Next Rehearsal: Soon...";
	}
}

add_shortcode('svc_add_rehearsal_date', 'next_rehearsal_date');

Notice the two highlighted lines, 4 and 5.

The dates need to be changed to indicate the dates of the first rehearsal and last rehearsal for the new semester.

Make the changes directly to the text of the snippet (which is PHP code), being very careful to follow the existing syntax and spelling, and then save the snippet.

Test to ensure that the next rehearsal date show correctly.

Add Rehearsals to Your Calendar

Finally the rightmost item, which allows people to add the rehearsals to their personal calendar, needs to be updated.

Choose “Edit with Elementor” on the home page, and then, in the Structure element, fully expand the second Container element, and click on the Shortcode below the Tooltip:

On the left, you will see the “Edit Shortcode” box:

Note the code for the shortcode is:

[add-to-calendar-button 
  name="Add Rehearsals to Your Calendar"
  description="SVC Rehearsals"
  startDate="2026-01-13"
  startTime="19:00"
  endDate="2026-05-05"
  endTime="21:00"
  timeZone="America/New_York"
  location="First Congregational Church, 10 Union St.,Milford, NH 03055"
  recurrence="weekly"
  recurrence_byDay="TU"
  options="'Apple','Google','iCal','Outlook.com','Yahoo'"
  listStyle="overlay"
  label="Add Rehearsals to Your Calendar"
]

Notice the highlighted lines, 4, 5, 6, and 7.

The dates need to be changed to indicate the dates of the first rehearsal and last rehearsal for the new semester. (note the date and time formats). The times will only need to be changed if the rehearsal times change.

The line 9 need only be changed if the location of the rehearsals changes.

Make the changes directly to the text of the shortcode, being very careful to follow the existing syntax and spelling, and then save/apply the shortcode, and publish the page from Elementor.

Test to ensure that the shortcode works correctly. You can try clicking on it from the home page, choose your preferred calendar (Google, Apple, etc), and verify that the proper entries are entered in the calendar (you can look at what is entered, and if incorrect, you can cancel out rather than saving).

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