Event Speaker

The Event Speaker A collection of fields that describe a specific type of content, like a news article, a person, or an event. Site admins can add additional content types by enabling optional modules. WDS can also create custom content types for a site. is used in conjunction with the Event content type to provide detailed information on speakers that are associated with an event. This is most commonly used when the events are for a conference, where each event may have one or more speakers giving a presentation.

Event Speakers have their own detail pages, which can show things like their photo, short bio, website, and more. These pages also list past and future events associated with the speaker.

Note that when this A collection of features or functionality that can be enabled on sites. WDS has made several optional modules available to site administrators to enable on their site. For example, the "News" module enables the News content type and provide a News List Block for displaying news on a page. is not enabled, basic information about event speakers can still be entered for events. This can be done directly on the event entry form. Once this module is enabled, that simple method is removed and replaced with a field to reference one or more speakers from this content type.

Requires enabling the Event Speaker module

This content type requires enabling an optional module. For now, WDS staff must enable this module. We are piloting its use on a couple of websites before we make it generally available.

Adding an Event Speaker

Visit the event speaker form by clicking Manage > Content > Add Content > Event Speaker.

In the main area of the form on the left, you'll find some important fields to fill out:

  • Name: Provide at least the Given (first) name and Family (last) name of the speaker, but you can also indicate a middle name or initial, a generational suffix, and any credentials (e.g. Ph.D).
  • Title: The speakers title (e.g. Director of IT Services).
  • Affiliation: The organization or institution the speaker is affiliated with.
  • Website: The speaker's personal or professional website.
  • External Bio: A checkbox that indicates the speaker's details page should instead redirect to the website indicated above. This is useful if the speaker would rather visitors refer to their own website for more details about them.
  • Pronouns: These pronouns will be displayed on the detail page and optionally in speaker list blocks.
  • Bio/Description: The speaker's short biography.

In the right sidebar, you'll find additional fields:

  • Featured Image: A primary image to associate with this speaker. It can be displayed in a number of ways on the speaker detail page and will also be used in Speaker List blocks.
  • Featured Image Display: Used to control how the image is displayed when viewing the speaker's detail page.
  • Background Image: If provided, this will be displayed on the speaker detail page as a background image behind their featured image and other basic details.
  • Categorization: Used to categorize this speaker. See Content Categorization to learn about managing the available categories.
    • Event Speaker Category is used to tag specific groups of speakers.
    • Sitewide Category is available on all standard content types and is typically used when you want to tag content items from multiple content types with the same category. For example, you may have events & news both related to a topic.
  • The user-friendly path for a content item or taxonomy term that replaces the system path. For example, /my-page can be an alias for /node/123. : This allows you to control the speaker's URL. Typically, it's best to leave the "Generate automatic URL alias" checkbox checked. However, there are times when you want to override this and provide a custom path. Keep custom URL aliases short but descriptive and use hyphens to separate words.
  • Metatags: Refer to the documentation on SEO and Search.
  • Authoring information: Contains content creator user and date/time of when the content was created.
  • URL redirects: This will show you all existing redirects to this content.
  • Promotion options: This is used if displaying a Event Speakers List block to stick the speaker at the top of the list.

Configuring the Event Speaker Module

Users with the role "site admin" can control some options the people module. Visit Configuration » System » Modules and click the settings button for Events: Speaker Extension.

Using this settings form, site admins can:

  • Control the default value used for the "Featured Image Display" field when adding new speakers.
  • Toggle the display of taxonomy terms associated with the speaker on the speaker detail pages (e.g. show output of Event Speaker Categories for the speaker).
  • Access the interface for modifying the layout of the speaker detail page. This can be used to modify how the past and upcoming events list blocks are configured.