Tag Archives: wordpress.com

Managing Calendars and Events on WordPress sites

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When I use WordPress as the platform for a community group’s website the first major obstacle that I come up against is calendar and event management. Things are handled differently depending on whether you are self-hosting WordPress or if you opt for the (attractive) option of (nearly) free hosting at WordPress.com.

Up until recently the limited options at WordPress.com have made me lean towards self-hosted solutions – see my old Scout group 2nd Abbotsford Port Neptune for example. There I setup Google Apps for the group and it is easy enough to drop the calendar code in to a WordPress page and thereby have easy access to even a multiple calendar solution.

My latest site wrestling with the calendar issue is for my current Scout group – 9th Brunswick Scouts. Hosted at WordPress.com, there has not been an easy way (until now) to show a GAFYD calendar. As you can see (at the time of writing) what I’ve done is use the Google Sites feature to create a page that I could then embed the calendar code in. On a subdomain if you are curious. This solution does get the job done, but doesn’t look very good (since it is hard to get a Google Sites page to match the look & feel of your WordPress site.)

Anyway, that was then and this, as they say, is now. Soon I will be upgrading 9th Brunswick to natively embed a GAFYD Google calendar – using the feature newly enabled by WordPress.

Since I had never had any success looking for more native solutions (rather than rely on Google Calendar in some form or other) this is how I have done things to date. Now, however, there are options!

An old (and one I had never found) WordPress plugin has been receiving some attention of late : Events Manager is self-described as a “wordpress event registration plugin freely available on wordpress.org. Events, bookings, calendars, locations and lots more.”

While free, Events Manager does carry a paid support option if you wish to either support the plugin or get support yourself. Once paid, you are upgraded to the ‘Pro’ version which enables you to accept PayPal payments for events.

While Events Manager was not being actively maintained (though it is now) a competitor sprang up based on the same open source code. This plugin is Events Manager Extended. At this time it remains both open source and completely free to use.

Both of these plugins offer the ability for external users to subscribe to the calendars – which is the main feature I look for when looking to provide a calendar for a community group.

I’d love to know if you’ve used either of these and what your experience has been. If I get time I do plan to test them out myself and see if they really can offer the features I need.

So if you are looking for calendar and event management on WordPress sites there are now some real choices to make!

Great tools: Yahoo Pipes

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The problem I just faced yesterday: I’m setting up a new WordPress.com site for my Scout group (9th Brunswick Scouts if you’d like a peek) and I wanted to display a Twitter list in a sidebar widget. Now a single account Twitter widget (for example the official tweets from Scouts Australia) is no trouble at all – WordPress has you covered there with a built-in Twitter widget. What I wanted, however, was this excellent Scouts-Australian twitter list from Scouts ACT. No dice, the WordPress.com plugin was written before Twitter introduced their lists feature.

So I start looking around for solutions. Twitter have a Goodies area which is their official tools for adding Tweet this or Twitter accounts buttons to your site. Even better, they have a great widget builders – with a list widget! I thought I was onto something here, but is is a script – and you can’t host scripts on WordPress.com. Sad.

So what was I to do? Enter Yahoo Pipes : “a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web.” Yahoo created this incredibly useful piece of internet plumbing almost three years ago!

Huh? How can that help? More on that in a moment …

There’s enormous value in Yahoo Pipes, if you’re willing to dig deep enough. Fortunately, it is also easy for those who have created a Pipe to share it – this is where Pipes come in really handy for ‘the rest of us.’

Find a great Pipe that fits your needs: clone it to your own space (both so you know you’ll always have access even if the author deletes the original and in case the author changes the pipe so you get different outputs than you were expecting!) – yes this does mean signing in with your Yahoo account. You do have one of those, right?

Is there a Pipe to solve our problem? You bet! Here it is : Twitter List RSS – Twitter list rss pipe gives you a (so far missing) RSS feed for any publicly available list on Twitter.

Starting to fall into place? OK now here’s the good bit. WordPress.com blogs have an RSS widget – so all you need to do is grab the RSS feed from this pipe, having set it up with your desired Twitter list, and bingo you are all set.

Other interesting Pipes you might find are : Flickr: Comments on my photos by other people Give it the last bit of your Flickr address and it will give you a feed of comments on your photos made by anyone but yourself!

There are literally bajillions of Pipes out there – so get exploring. Even better, Yahoo are working on Pipes V2 Engine which is of interest if you’re going to start getting intot he plumbing business yourself :-)

Have fun hacking Twitter lists into your WordPress.com hosted blogs!