Include date and time (and maybe location and description) in Oneboxes for Events

[nathank (Nathan Kershaw)]

At present, the Oneboxes for events are a bit meh. Basically, they are no different to regular topic Oneboxes, and don’t include the date, time, description, etc etc (unless put into the Topic Title as a workaround).

Here is an example event from our site:

Urbanerds Ōtepoti Dunedin September 2025

Would it be possible to hook into the new (and brilliant) cards that appear on click in the calendar for events, and serve these up as oneboxes? For example:

That might not be feasible at all, but I do wonder if the metadata could be modified for event posts so that they Onebox in a way that highlights the critical event info (especially internally).

[opcourdis]

I have 0 votes left but you have my vote anyway , this would make the event promotion shine more indeed.

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

@chapoi / @j.jaffeux I have been thinking about this.

I think a fundamental change we need here is to introduce proper event URLs so you can use them to onebox and instead of oneboxing:

https://SITE/t/slug/123

We would onebox

https://SITE/event/slug/1234

It does open a bit of a pandoras box (in a good way though)

1. How do people find the link to the event? (I guess we add to context menu)
2. What happens if they visit the event directly from the URL? (I guess we redirect to post event for now)

[chapoi]

Agree with the idea – can definitely do something nicer here

@sam

How do people find the link to the event? (I guess we add to context menu)

If you mean this:

That seems the right place to me too.

[nathank (Nathan Kershaw)]

@sam

@chapoi / @j.jaffeux I have been thinking about this.

Have you had any further thoughts on this?

I’ve just oneboxed a couple of events today, and found I had to add the date / time into the title so they made sense. That really shouldn’t be necessary.