Event Calendar

Your Event Calendar organizes and displays events that occur on particular dates and times. Events can be shown in several ways:

• A calendar month view, with event links appearing in the daily cells.
• A list of events happening in a particular month, or on a particular day.
• A list of upcoming events. (Also available as an RSS feed.)

Calendars

Each section can maintain its own calendar of events. Events tagged with that section ID will appear on that section's calendar.

Events that are tagged with NO section ID are shared events. They will appear on ALL calendars.

Events

You can fill in the event details when you create a new event, or edit an existing event's details. Events have the following attributes:

title

this is used for links and headings

description

this can be as lengthly as necessary, and can include formatting, links, and images (from your libraries)

type

this is optional, and can help for filtering crowded calendars down to only the type of interest

registration limit

this is used by the Registration tools, but does not have to be specified, otherwise

notes

this information is not displayed, except to the administrator

main event

events can be nested; for example a seminar within a conference. This field indicates the main (larger) event that this event is part of.

privacy

this controls who is allowed to view the event details

owner

some calendars allow your users to add events to them. This field tells you which user created this event.

Creating Events

To add a new event to the calendar, do one of the following:

• Use the new event tool to set up a new event from scratch. This tool appears when you are viewing the calendar itself.
• Use the add activity tool to set up an event within another event. This tool appears when you are viewing the main event. (See Activities, below.)
• Use the copy event tool if you want to duplicate an existing event. You will need to enter the new event start date, and the calendar will duplicate that event at the new date. You can edit the event details after it has been copied.
• If you are adding a new time to an existing event, you can edit that event's schedule to add new times. (See Schedule, below.)

Schedule

The event schedule is a list of start and end dates/times. A normal, simple event will have one entry in the schedule, and the event setup form will ask for this one schedule entry. You will be able to add more later if needed, using the edit schedule function.

A schedule entry must specify a start date, and optionally a start time, end date, and end time. Times are optional--times of 12:00 AM are ignored. The end date/time is optional; leave the date blank to ignore it.

You can add additional entries to the schedule. This is useful in certain cases, for example:

• there is an agenda or itinerary for the event, which needs to be shown to users
• there are multiple classes or sessions, such as a course that has classes over several days.

When adding a new schedule entry, you can provide some descriptive text to explain the extra dates/times.

Recurring Events

For events that have multiple meetings, such as courses, you can schedule many dates at once. When adding a schedule entry, you can also specify a repeat interval up to a certain date in the future. Multiple schedule entries will automatically be added for those extra dates.

Note that a recurring event is treated as a single event that has multiple dates and times. This is different from multiple similar events. Consider these two cases:

1. A course that lasts 4 weeks, meeting on Tuesday nights. This is a single event; a person taking the course will be coming to all 4 of the scheduled times. Use the recurring event feature in the scheduler to setup the timetable.
2. A 1-night class that runs on every Tuesday for the next 4 weeks. This is 4 different events; a person taking the class will come to one of the 4 classes, depending on which one they register for. Do not set this up as a recurring event; instead use the copy event function to duplicate the event several times.

Undated Events

The calendar will also accept events with NO date or time. This can be useful if you want some event management features (such as registrations) but do not want them to be tied to a specific date. For example:

• An event that occurs all the time, such as a daily staff meeting. Putting dates on these events will cause them to populate all of your monthly calendar days, which isn't especially helpful.
• An annual membership drive, in which people can register at any time, with no actual final date. Setting this up as an event allows you to make use of the event registration tools. Leaving the dates off means the registration never closes.

Undated events will not show up in regular calendar views such as month displays. To display them, you need to link direct to the event.

When creating events, you must enter a date. To make an undated event, enter an arbitrary date, then go to the schedule and delete it.

Activities

An activity is an event within another event. For example:

• A seminar within a conference.
• A competition within a tournament.
• A breakout session within a meeting.

Activities are normally not shown separately on calendar views, but are displayed once the user visits the main event. Other than that, they have all the features of regular events, including their own iCal reminders, their own registration, and so on.

To create an activity, visit the main event, and select the add activity button. Then proceed as if setting up a new event. In the administration tools, the activity will appear as its own event, which can be managed using all of the same tools as the main event.

Sites/Venues

Sites and venues are locations that are important for the event. For example:

• conference centers
• meeting rooms
• golf courses
• hotels

Use the sites/venues tool to select locations for this event. The locations are taken from your address book. To add locations, go to the address book, where you can provide descriptions, contact information, and coordinates for mapping tools.

Venue information is displayed after the regular event information.

Registrations

If you want to accept online registrations for this event, possibly including e-commerce registration fees, click on the registrations tool. This will launch the Event Registrations plug-in. Consult that plug-in's help files for information on how to configure registrations.