Those of you who have listened to my dull ramblings in the background of SYWP sessions will know I’ve got a bit of a hang up with a suitable, sensible events / calendar type plugins in WordPress. After sounding off on Twitter, Saul asked me to email him with my requirements and then suggested we started a public discussion about it.
I rambled to Saul about how I wanted to manage a calendar containing some recurring events and some standalone events. I want it to use Custom Post types or fit the WordPress UI and look integrated so it’s easy for clients. My other big hang up was that most plugins handle recurring events badly ie creating hundreds of database entries for all future events.
Saul deduced the following list of requirements from my ramblings:
- allow you to create and manage events with
– rich text descriptions,
– links to eventbrite (or do you actually want ticket booking to be done within the site?)
– start and end dates/time
– flexible and editable recurring dates
– locations that can be shown as maps
using the standard WP management styling
- display lists of events as:
– an RSS feed
– a month calendar view
– an HTML list (with inherited classes)
– a subscribe-able iCal feed
Saul suggested I look at using Google Calendar, which reminded me of a thought I’d had a while back and totally forgotten. The main advantage would be Googles advance handling of recurring events. There are a number of plugins that seem to offer some kind of integration of Google Calendar into WordPress on the front end but I’ve not found anything that offers control from within the WP UI. I’m interested in trying to put some time into this and see where I can get but I’d be interested to have a public discussion (as suggested by Saul) as to whether people think this is a good route or has insight into this.
Any thoughts? I’m looking into the Google Calendar API to see how I could gain control of the Google calendar from within the WP UI.
