Profile: Munro

Problem:

Right now my set up is simple, with the 10 event paged like regular posts, but I am afraid the client may want a monthly dropdown to select only events from that month or the previous and next to be the "previous month" or "next month" with the month names like a real calendar.

Is this possible with Views from an event custom date field?

Solution:

There are not such kind of built-in features within Views plugin, it needs custom codes.

Here are my suggestions:
1) You can setup the monthly dropdown, "previous month" or "next month" to pass URL parameter "my-month" to the view, for example:
http://my-site-url/?my-month=2018-03

It will be able to pass URL parameter "my-month", value is 2018-03,

2) use Views filter hook "wpv_filter_query" to trigger a PHP function
https://toolset.com/documentation/programmer-reference/views-filters/#wpv_filter_query
get the URL parameter "my-month" value: $_GET['my-month'],
calculate the timestamp values of the start and end of the specific month:
http://php.net/manual/en/ref.datetime.php

3) Then use above values to add filter on the custom date field "Event date":
https://codex.wordpress.org/Class_Reference/WP_Query#Custom_Field_Parameters

Relevant Documentation:

https://toolset.com/documentation/programmer-reference/views-filters/#wpv_filter_query