Google wants additional fields and locations broken apart for event listings
As per 10/1/18 list email, Google wants to ding us in their results for not being up to snuff with our events formatting.
Looks like they'd want us to break up location into "place", "streetAddress", "addressLocality" (city), and so forth. I mean, we could do that, but it makes our publish form a bit more complicated, breaking up the current location text box into at least 6 form elements, including country. All this specified location data is to suit google mapping features, as per a related developer page I found in a quick search: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/event
It might be easier to label "description" and "image" in page and/or in listings we use for google indexing, but I'm not sure about "performer", since that's not always relevant (protests, etc). Perhaps "offers.price" would not be a bad field to have, since we encourage postings of free or near free events.
Mark suggested including some sort of auto-fill, which would be handy for commonly used locations (Omni Commons, etc). That's more of a nice-to-have at this point, unless it would be relatively easy to implement. Could be broken out into separate ticket and handled later.
[As for workload on this, I can take care of front-end implementation, but do not have access for database updates, and a head start with PHP would be appreciated.]
From Google:
Search Console has identified that your site is affected by 6 new Events related issues. This means that Events may be negatively affected in Google Search results. We encourage you to fix these issues. Top 5 new issues found, ordered by number of affected pages:
Missing field "performer"
Missing field "description"
Missing field "offers"
Missing field "image"
Missing field "location.address"