Today, I noticed Pippin Williamson from Pippin’s Plugins was tweeting about an events calendar plugin for WordPress that he’s working on. Since we have a few of Pippin’s plugins in our arsenal and find his work to be top-notch, I joined in on the conversation.
140 characters aren’t enough. Here are my thoughts on what we need for a WordPress events calendar plugin.
Since we run WordPress in a networked environment, here’s how I envision it working…
- Central location of an events calendar (WP site) at uca.edu/calendar (Currently running Helios calendar).
- Multiple calendar categories like our current calendar.
- Multiple views – traditional calendar as well as a list view.
- The ability to add a person in the author role (I think) and have them only see specific categories.
- This will allow us to have a category that no one but the calendar admin can see and let them tag calendar posts to appear on the university home page. It will also keep a person in the biology department from accidentally tagging an event and it appearing on the Music department’s calendar.
- As for restricting categories, from an admin point of view, I like the simplicity of the Restrict Categories plugin and the fact it allows you to restrict access based on the user role AND username. The problem with it – and others – is that it doesn’t support custom post types or taxonomies.
- Multisite capable so that a shortcode and/or widget can be used to display calendar categories on other sites. For example:
- College of Fine Arts and Communication can use a shortcode to show events specific to the college as well as events from each departments (Art, Music, Theatre, etc.)
- At the same time, the Music department would display only music events on their site.
- Recurring events.
- Start Time, End Time or All Day event option.
- Event location.
- Google maps integration would be nice.
- The ability to choose from a predetermined location list as well as add a new location. Having this also be something that could tie into a multisite shortcode would allow us to list all events in specific locations regardless of the college or department having the event.
- TBD