Living Open Source

Blogging Your Church with WordPress:– Calendars & Events

May 16th, 2007 by Tim 14

One feature that most church blogs need is a way to manage some kind of events calendar. This is one feature you need a WordPress plugin to achieve, and one which is more difficult if you are running on WordPress.com.

Using the RS Event Plugin

There are a couple of calendar type plugins but the solution I have tended to settle on is to use the RSS Event plugin which adds an additional timestamp element to a post and then simply lists upcoming events in the sidebar. It is quite simple and doesn’t have a calender view – just a list. I reviewed a couple of other plugins a while back. You can read that post here.
Most of my themes come with support for RS Event built-in, so you don’t even need to tweak the theme yourself.

UPDATE: You can get this plugin here now.

Grabbing your Google Calendar

google An alternative approach might be to use a Google Calendar to manage events. Then use on of the plugins that can pull in the iCal feed somewhere in the sidebar. You could try iCal Events or UpcommingEvents.

14 Comments on the Comment Wall

1 On June 17th, 2007 at 7:40 pm Richard Huss said:

I’m using iCal events on our parish site; it was pretty easy to knock up a sidebar widget that uses it, and to create a custom page template for our what’s on page. Google calendar provides the iCal feed.

Neither uses the default iCal events rendering; I made a couple of tweaks, looking at the Location field so I can get it to link to the map pages for the common venues; and I use the Description field for a link back to our site for occasions when that’s needed.
2 On June 17th, 2007 at 7:52 pm Tim said:

Richard, that’s a one cool WordPress site. Is your iCal widget downloadable anywhere?
3 On June 18th, 2007 at 8:09 am Richard Huss said:

Glad you like it. I’ve uploaded the widget to http://www.thehusses.plus.com/widget.html though at present it is very much a basic “what works for us” thing with limited configurability.
4 On August 6th, 2007 at 3:58 pm S said:

I used both of these, but for some reason when it pulls the calendar, it gets monthly events (like communion on 1st Sunday) and puts them on *every* Sunday
5 On September 20th, 2007 at 12:35 pm Richard Huss said:

Sorry, I’ve only just noticed S’s comment. iCal events does not support all the available kinds of recurring event that Google calendar can produce; I just create a separate event for each Sunday service, which is not unmanageable.

I suppose some time (when I get a moment, ha ha!) I should look at the iCal events parsing code (borrowed from another project) and see if I can manage to figure out how to add support for more recurring event types.
6 On September 27th, 2007 at 10:27 am Ralph Depping said:

Hi Tim,
just wondering if you’ve tested the RS event plugin at all with wordpress 2.3? It seems like the db structure has changed and as a result the plugin no long works. It looks like on the RS plugin discussion board at http://www.sargant.com/blog/forum/rs-event/ that it is a known issue and someone did post a link to a 2.3 compatible version, but it seems to point to a German website requiring registration (and my German isn’t good enough to register!).

Anyway I was just wondering if by any chance it was something you might have a fix/work around for as a number of the great themes you’ve posted use the RS event. Thanks for all your work in the area, it’s a real help, Ralph
7 On September 27th, 2007 at 9:46 pm Tim said:

Not on 2.3 yet! I’ll try and take a look at some point.
8 On September 28th, 2007 at 11:11 am Ralph Depping said:

Hi Tim,
I got a reply from my post on the rs event forum. You can download a 2.3 compatible rs event from:

forum.wordpress-deutschland.org

The only thing is you need to register. If you want to avoid the bother of registering (the site is in German!) let me know and I can post you a copy of the plugin. Cheers, Ralph
9 On September 28th, 2007 at 11:52 am Tim said:

Thanks for that Ralph.
10 On December 14th, 2007 at 11:11 pm A Friend said:

try this one. Worked for me and my rs-event plugin is working great.

forum.wordpress-deutschland.org
11 On March 9th, 2008 at 5:38 am Mathieu Yuill said:

I’m currently putting together a blog for my sister who is a missionary in Japan and came across your site. Great information on here – I really appreciate you taking the time to share all this great stuff!
12 On May 12th, 2008 at 6:02 pm Corey said:

Excellent work on your themes and such. I have a question about the rs event plugin. From your link to the wordpress plugins site it appears this plugin is no longer available. That being the case, is there a way to use a different events plugin in its place in your theme(s)?
13 On May 12th, 2008 at 6:39 pm Tim said:

Corey, see comment above yours or download from here. This version works in WP 2.5.
14 On July 7th, 2009 at 2:32 pm mrben said:

Hey Tim. Just to say that I’ve been working with WP Calender ( http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/calendar/ ) recently, and it seems to be a really good plugin. I’ve made some changes to add better recurring events (see http://www.kieranoshea.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=98&p=449&sid=992a529d8a83c610d59a5ea2565e1c66#p449 ) and I really like it’s approach, notably that you don’t need to add a post to get an event, but you can tie events to posts where required.