Nonprofit Events Calendar Solution

[osarusan]

Hi, I'm working with a nonprofit (http://www.jasgp.org) which has a pretty extensive events calendar that includes multiple categories. I'm looking for a flexible calendar solution, but I can't seem to find one that will meet all of our needs, though each calendar I've tried can meet certain needs. I thought I'd share my current solution with everyone else here; maybe it will be useful to people looking for a different way to display events, and maybe someone will be able to suggest a way for me to tweak my setup to better meet my needs too.

Basically, what I need is a calendar that can display events in both a calendar and a list view, keep track of different event categories, and (the most difficult part), be able to display select events from certain categories under an "upcoming events" module. I know it's asking a whole lot... and here's what I've done so far:

I use the Core Joomla section/category system to organize my events. All of my events are content items within separate categories, all published in a section called "Events." The ones I want to appear on the "upcoming events" list, I check "show on frontpage," and use the Display News module to publish them - showing only frontpage content. So the website has a full listing of events, as well as a way to highlight certain events on the home page.

This system works really great so far... It perfectly displays event lists using the Content and Section Blog displays, and it's really easy to keep the upcoming events list current, while having complete control over what events from which categories go into it. It's also (most importantly) easy to teach to people who don't know their way around computers, which is important for small nonprofits who need to edit their websites on their own. It does, however, have a few drawbacks: one - I can't use the frontpage component now for anything but this module, since you can only have 1 frontpage in Joomla; two - there's no way to display a calendar for this set up, as there are with some of the other calendar components.

I've tried the calendars in the Joomla extensions section, but unfortunately they all use their own system of content management, so you can't use the standard Joomla content editor. So far it seems like it's a trade off between having a highly functional calendar and having your content organized so that its easier for the average person to edit it...

Oh well, I hope that description can be useful to some of you. And if you have any suggestions on improving this setup, I'd love to hear them. It seems like a really good calendar is one of the most wanted features in Joomla...

[tcp]

It may be difficult to implement a true calendar system because you are organizing your events by content.  Unless you want to hack code, the tool that can meet your needs the closest looks like Content Calendar.

http://extensions.joomla.org/component/ ... Itemid,35/

You might be able to represent future events by cheating and setting the creation date in the future. 

tcp

[osarusan]

Yeah, I've been "cheating" like that for a while now, and it's worked great on my Upcoming Events section. I did just download that calendar extension today and test it out -- it works nicely! Unfortunately it's a little light on features, but it does what it says well, and works with the system I've got going on.

I know it's kind of tough doing this organizing events by content, but that seems to me to be a much more efficient way of doing things than organizing them by separate components. After all, AlphaContent is a content-based directory system, and it's by far the best free directory system I've seen for Joomla. Using content for component items makes it a lot easier for newbies at Joomla to manage the site when the website creator is not around, and also keeps things more or less in the same mold... which makes it a lot easier for site design, in my experience so far.

Honestly, I can't see a reason not to use content for a calendar system, as it's structured fairly similarly. Granted, I'm not a Joomla developer at all, and a real newbie when it comes to PHP... but I wish that more components were like AlphaContent and this Calendar component and used Content instead of creating their own data sets.

[tcp]

Honestly, I can't see a reason not to use content for a calendar system, as it's structured fairly similarly. Granted, I'm not a Joomla developer at all, and a real newbie when it comes to PHP... but I wish that more components were like AlphaContent and this Calendar component and used Content instead of creating their own data sets.

At the risk of sounding like I'm shameless promoting my own component, you could use DBQ to search the jos_content table and return a summary of articles based on a range of data, for example, today until today+1month.  This would give you the search capability and some ability to display event information, although not in a true "calendar" view.

Toby

[tgelvin]

I webmaster 4 sites and I have looked for a calendar that would manage the events for all 4 organizations... I've tried probably 5 different calenders before the JEvents Calendar.

http://extensions.joomla.org/component/option,com_mtree/task,viewlink/link_id,95/Itemid,35/

I am very pleased with this calendar...

Here are the 4 sites I manage:

www.svchurchofchrist.org
school.svchurchofchrist.org
cubscouts.svchurchofchrist.org
boyscouts.svchurchofchrist.org