Template Overrides for Event Schedule Manager

Creating template overrides in Event Schedule Manager (ESM) might be not as straightforward, but it’s not rocket science either. Let’s see.

ESM has templates for three of its post types: sessions, speakers, and sponsors. The respective template files can be found in the event-schedule-manager/templates/ folder.

Although the plugin does not include a built-in method for creating template overrides for these, a simple snippet can do the trick.

add_filter( 'single_template', function( $template ) {
	// Bail, if not Event Schedule Manager
	if ( ! str_contains( $template, 'event-schedule-manager/templates') ) {
		return $template;
	}

	// Get the template override.
	$template_override = trailingslashit( get_stylesheet_directory() ) . 'event-schedule-manager/' . basename( $template );
	
	// Check if the file exists.
	if ( file_exists( $template_override ) ) {
		return $template_override;
	}

	return $template;
}, 20, 1 );

The above snippet will instruct WordPress that if one of the templates from Event Schedule Manager is about to be used, first check if there is a template override available in the child theme, and make use of that.

Let’s talk about the files themselves.

First, go to your child theme folder (wp-content/themes/{your-child-theme}) and create a folder named event-schedule-manager.

Then copy and paste the template files you want to override from the wp-content/plugins/event-schedule-manager/templates/ folder in the newly created folder in your child theme.

In the end, the folder and file structure for the overrides should look like this:

wp root
|-- wp-content
    |-- themes
        |-- my-child-theme
            |-- event-schedule-manager
                |-- session-template.php
                |-- speaker-template.php
                |-- sponsor-template.php

Now you can start editing these templates to your heart’s desire.