“Do you know where you’re going to….?”
Do you like the things that life is showing you? Well, maybe you need to update your calendar! Whether you’re a Mom and Pop establishment, a local school, artist or just the Über-Blogger of the Internet, an events calendar can allow you to keep people posted on what you are doing as well as allow people to make a note of some special event just by the mere wayward glance of a site’s sidebar.
WYSIWYG
Really, what more do you want from a calendar? Why have your readers or clients hunt for information? It shouldn’t be a scenario out of “Where’s Waldo: The Movie!” Just an archive of current and upcoming milestones that you and your followers can use to keep tabs.
So what calendar will best suit your needs? Something that serves as little more than a brief reminder of what day, week or year it happens to be? Now, WordPress offers Widgets that you can drag and drop to have some active calendar of sorts, but of course, it you want to modify and announce events with some flair, then you should try to incorporate a simple but effective events calendar. The editorial calendar plugin for example enables WordPress administrators and editors to manage the dates for multiple posts at once. This is a calendar created by Kieran O’Shea. Simple and straight forward, it’s my calendar of choice for WordPress. Easy to use, easy to update, easy to install!
Features include:
- Monthly view of events
- Mouse-over details for each event
- Events can have a timestamp (optional)
- Events can display their author (optional)
- Events can span more than one day
- Multiple events per day possible
- Events can repeat on a weekly, monthly or yearly basis
- Repeats can occur indefinitely or a limited number of times
- Easy to use events manager in admin dashboard
- Sidebar function/Widget to show today’s events
- Sidebar function/Widget to show upcoming events
- Lists of today’s events can be displayed in posts or pages
- Lists of upcoming events can be displayed in posts or pages
- Comprehensive options panel for admin
- Modifiable CSS using the options panel
- Optional drop down boxes to quickly change month and year
- User groups other than admin can be permitted to manage events
- Events can be placed into categories
- A calendar of events for just one of more categories can be displayed
- Categories system can be switched on or off
- Pop up JavaScript calendars help the choosing of dates
- Events can be links pointing to a location of your choice
- Full internationalization is possible
- Compatible with WordPress MU
Seems like a lot, doesn’t it? Of course, it’s not necessary to use all the features, but it allows for a mix and match depending on your needs. If you run a charter school for example that will have multiple administrators, then each admin will find what’s best suited for his or her event postings. If each administrator has his or her own calendar, well the sky is the limit, but of course that would probably result in multiple unique calendar pages, and it’s enough to keep track of one list of events from multiple posters.
As part of an ongoing assignment in cooperation with several colleagues, we were asked to incorporate a Google calendar into the website of Art Space Charter School in Asheville, NC. Actually, I’m not as big a fan of the Google plugin, but I suppose I need to play with it more. You’ll have to establish a Gmail account to gain access to a Google calendar, so follow this link for more info. I will say that it is VERY user friendly. Yep! What you see is what you get! I’ve started using mine recently and have already included some upcoming events.
Localendar (pretty clever name, huh?) is a WYSIWYG event calendar plugin that is open source and allows for multiple admins, though it seems a little less sophisticated. Plus, the free version ( yes, there is a fee for the upgrade) will bring up banner ads to your site.
Here’s a sample calendar created with Localendar.
Now, though they seem pretty straight forward overall when used as widgets, events calendars can be an issue when customizing templates. The WordPress plugins are easier to deal with than the seemingly benign Google Calendar, but that takes some tweaking on your part!
Look, it can be a matter of taste, but as much as I like my hard copy calendar with old photos of James Dean hanging in the spare bedroom, a virtual calendar is far more utilitarian if your intent is to remind friends, clients, students and the various ilk of what’s happening. The extra benefit of allowing multiple admins is a fantastic way of organizing events on a grander scale.
Plus, it saves from having everyone scribbling notes all over James Dean.
Oh, and if you thought I was joking….
