Adding an Event Calendar to your WordPress website

An Event Calendar lets you display a calendar on your website showing upcoming events.

These might be your events (speaking engagements, classes you run). Or any other events of interest to your visitors.

Hovering your mouse over a date on the calendar shows the details.

You can display event information in several ways:

• a sidebar widget lets you show the current month’s events in a calendar format (as above) or as a list of upcoming events (to the right). Both display summary details for the event – date, time and location.
• a full page calendar display lets you show a monthly calendar format for your events
• you can create a blog post linked to each event

We have extended the excellent EventCalendar WordPress plugin by Luke Howell to make this feature available. So these instructions apply for pretty much any WordPress website, you may need to upload and install the plugin first if you don’t have an OM4 website.

Instructions for use

Setting up for the first time

1. Go to your Dashboard and the Plugins page, find the Events Calendar plugin and click Activate.
2. If you prefer your dates to show Day/Month rather than Month/Day, go to the (new) Dashboard, Events Calendar, Options page and change the Widget Calendar Dates option from m-d to d-m and click Update Options
3. Go to Dashboard, Events Calendar, Add Event and add a new event

Displaying on your website

1. To add a calendar to your sidebar, go to Dashboard, Design, Widgets, find the Event Calendar widget and add it to your sidebar. Click on the Edit button for the widget and update the title that appears in your sidebar, and choose whether to display in Calendar or Event List mode
2. To add a large calendar to a web page or blog post, open up the page for editing, switch to HMTL view and type in [[EventsCalendarLarge]]

Creating a draft blog post for a new event

When you create a new event, their is a check box to Create Post for Event. This will create a draft blog post that includes a link to the event. Once you have created the event, head over to Dashboard, Manage, Posts and check your drafts. Open the post, add any text or images to describe the event, and press Publish.

That is it! Add as many events to your calendar as you want.

This is how the Large Calendar looks when you put one in a web page.

Display events from a public Google Calendar

You can also integrate a public calendar from your Google Calendar and display in a page on your website.

One advantage of doing this is you can have several people (all using Google Apps) able to contribute to the public calendar, which makes it useful for clubs and small businesses.

You need to be running Google Apps on your domain to do this. We haven’t published a plugin yet, if you have an OM4 site and want do to this, get in touch and we’ll sort it out for you as a Webmaster task.