Comparison of Event Calendar Plug-ins
We are thinking of converting the school’s website from typo3 to wordpress to make it easier for staff and parents to collaborate in maintaining the website.
We would like to have a event listing feature that is really easy to use. From a usability point of view, it would be nice if there was one obvious place to maintain the events and their dates. In addition the school likes to have a paper newsletter for the community. That usually has a upcoming events page sorted by months. It would be nice to print this out from the web. Days of week should be noted to make it easier for parents to remember. From a maintenance point of view, it should be really simple to install and preferably immune to wordpress version upgrades (ie: minimal fiddling to re-install). Starting from the wordpress list I distilled a sub-list for further evaluation. Due to the number on the list, and limited time to bedtime (sleep is a wonderful thing), a bit of judging a book by the cover was applied to the first cut (IE: quality of the presentation, documentation and support for the plug-in was used as an indicator of the quality of the plug-in.)
Worth further evaluation:
- FireTree’s Wpcal Event Calendar 3.1 looks interesting and is well presented. No hack required any more for wordpress 2.0. Uses posts as events with a separate category. The posts can be kept off the “blog” page, but will appear in the recent posts – this maybe useful to also have a new event posting be treated as “news”. One could also have an events category page where one can list all the events and edit from there. (Maybe add an “add an event” link to the template?). I have a concern though about the event dates being stuck down below the post edit screen – not so obvious and easy for a usser who is just thinking about entering a bunch of events.
- Sargant’s simple RS event tracker could be a go- there is a lot to be said for simplicity!
- FahlstadDesign’s WP-Cal looks promising. Relatively easy to install and I like the way that one can add the event straight from the calendar page. Events are separate from posts. The plug-in’s offering page is reasonably well done. But I can see it is easy to accidentally put the wrong date in – how does one change the date? Delete and re-add? more investigation required.
- Sothq’s wp.2.0 only events plug-in – if all else fail, then this could be a go. But not quite as cleanly presented as the others.
So far what I want is a combination of WP-Cal’s ease of adding an event, combined with firetree’s integration to sidebar etc…..
Not quite right
Too cute or a specific purpose not that suitable to ours, or they are just “Post” Calendars – ie: they show a box calendar flagging dates for which there are posts. This is not what we are looking for.
- Peter’s sleeps till date countdown
- Wp-ical not what we are looking for either.
LiveCalendar - Calendar 2.0 from “paranoid’s life rambling” has limited explanation and support – not going to explore further.
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