Blogging your Church with WordPress 2:– Calendar and Event Plugins
I thought it was time for another series on using WordPress to run your church web site. One important addition to “out-of the box” WordPress is a way of managing and displaying some kind of events calendar.
There a few more options available now than when I last reviewed this subject.
RS Event
This has been my favoured solution for a while because it adds event data to a post, so that each event is directly linked to a post. Most of my churchy Wordpress themes support this plugin. BUT the plugin’s author, Robert Sargent, seems to have disappeared – at least online. So for now, I have my own page dedicated to this plugin where you can download a version fixed to work with WordPress 2.3 and above.
ICS Calendar
A different approach is to use something like Google Calendar to manage the events. You can then use a plugin to take the calendar feed and display upcoming events on your blog. There are a number of plugins that do this. I highlight ICS Calendar here, since it gives you option of displaying the results either in a list or calendar style. Though I personally think using a calendar style is unhelpful – it hides the most important data from the user.
Other plugins that work in a similar way: Upcoming Events and iCal Events
WPListCal
WPListCal takes a different approach again, adding pages to the WP dashboard to manage events as a seperate content type. You manage events just like you manage posts, pages and links. You can then list events on a page or post using a special tag, or incorporate events into your theme files using a PHP function call.
GigPress
GigPress is apparently built specifically for touring bands. Management of events is kept within Wordpress, like with WPListCal and RS Event, but with the emphasis on band gigs, there are quite a few extra features.
The lastest version includes the ability to link a post to each show event, which I think is a requirement that all WP event plugins should meet. However, this feature seems to mess up the styling of the events table when I tried it. I guess with some tweaking of CSS I could get it to display properly, but I tried on several different themes and it doesn’t work out of the box, which is disappointing. But is an awesome plugin, even if the gig focus makes it less useful for other applications. It could work well for a church, especially if you use different venues or sell tickets!
GigPress homepage
Summary
For me RS Event remains the most useful solution, since when you click on an event, you are directed to a post rather than off to Google or somewhere else. The direct link between an event and a post, I think is quite important. While GigPress does this, and a lot more, RS Event is just so so simple. To establish a link with a Google based calendar, you have to add a link back to the blog in the calendar event description somewhere, if you want to give more than brief details about the event.
More posts in this series:
- Blogging your Church with WordPress 2:– Calendar and Event Plugins
- Blogging your Church with WordPress 2:– Adding video to your blog
I discovered WPListCal last week and decided to use that on my church’s site, rather than Event Calendar which we had been using. It works really well and suits my needs perfectly.
Vicky, that’s a great WordPress church site. The only downside of the WPListCal plugin is that visitors can’t click on an event to be taken to a post or page about the event. If they added a link to a post feature, it would be my choice too. This is why I’m still sticking to RS Event for now.
Tim, thanks for that useful post. We have been rethinking our evening service and want to create a site that works with facebook. Do you know a way of using facebook calendar with wordpress. The only way I can see is exporting the event from facebook and importing it into another calendar. (sunday-night dot org dot uk)
Well, I think you can export yoru upcoming events in facebook in iCal format – so you should be able to just grab the export url for upcoming facebook events and use the ics plugin above.
Thanks, it’s a shame there’s no way of doinging it automatically.
I’ve found and am using wp-cal (http://www.fahlstad.se/wp-plugins/wp-cal) on a camp website I’m webmastering (www.shilohonhatch.com). It’s just yet another choice out there. Thanks for the post AND keeping RS Event alive!
Graham, this is automatic, I thought. Grab the link Facebook gives you when you chose the export events option and paste it into the options for the ics plugin. From then on your upcoming events will appear on your blog. The plugin will cache the ics file, so updates may not appear instantly. You chose how many events to show at a time. Lots of other plugins use the same idea.
Interesting problem using rs event
I setup an event, configured the sidebar using the widget
the event was added for 26 July 2008 (my calendar makes that a Saturday)
when I add the day of the week to the formatting, the rs event widget lists it as a Friday.
I added another event for today, which correctly shows as tuesday
I added another event for 1 june, which shows as saturday 1 may (date is still correct on re-checking post). 1 May was actually a thursday, 1 June is a Sunday
Any ideas. Seems a bit random!!
Thanks so much for keeping the RS Event plugin alive! If your version really works with 2.5, then I can finally upgrade the ministerial association website from 2.2.1 (www.valpochurches.org). It uses your Upsilon theme. And a volunteer has already input a couple hundred upcoming events using RS Events. I thought I was just doomed to < 2.5 forever!
On our church website, I upgraded to 2.5 before I realized RS Events would break, and in my search for a solution, I ended up just hacking the template php to allow me to show future posts in the Events category in a coming events list. It’s actually simpler than RS Events, since you just set the post date/Timestamp to the date of the event.
So, again…. Thanks!
I embed a google calendar, and pull in the agenda view as an RSS. Not a fully functional solution, but it works.
FYI… Two things:
1. I’m an idiot. My template hack I mentioned earlier didn’t work for non-logged-in users (ie, everybody). I didn’t notice, because I was always logged in.
2. The updated RS Event plugin here doesn’t work on WP 2.2. I tried updating the plugin before upgrading the blog, and it breaks. So I’ll test it elsewhere before making migrating the live ministerial assoc. website.
A previous commenter mentioned Event Calendar, but not why he stopped using it. It seems to provide what you are looking for. Like RS Event, you create a post in an events category and add date and time information. Events can be displayed in a sidebar widget, and clicking the title link takes you to the full post. EC3 provides an iCal feed for events as well.
I’m not the developer, just an EC3 user. EC3’s homepage is http://wpcal.firetree.net/. You can see an example of how I’m using it at http://rmvr.com/ (not a church website!).
Thanks for the other good suggestions.