Events: Search filters - remove countries without events

[pkevan]

Having a list of every country in the world is unnecessary as a search filter - it would be more appropriate to list the countries where events are going to take place, than having a huge list to filter where they might not return any results.

[pkevan]

Example: all countries which appear in the list currently have no events.

[iandunn]

Right now it's using wcorg_get_countries(). I think we'd have to change it to query wporg_events, and get the distinct country codes where there's at least 1 upcoming event. Then we'd need to JOIN to one of the Geonames tables to get the country name.

We'd also need to switch that to query past events when looking at the Past Events template.

That might introduce some problems w/ country names that CLDR solves, but that's probably a smaller issue that what's being fixed.

I wonder if the need for this will be removed once we add searching? That should make it easy for folks to find what they're looking for, and at that point the need for this seems minimal to me. What do you think?

[pkevan]

Yeah, I looked into it a bit yesterday, and found it was quite complicated - I was hoping that the stat 108 countries on the homepage was a cached query somewhere that would help this, but turns out it's manual. The other option I thought about was through: https://central.wordcamp.org/reports/meetup-groups-report/?report-year=2023&period=all&action=Show+results which returns countries.

It could well be solved with searching, since I wonder who really uses filters these days.