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Comparison of Event Calendar Plug-ins

A quick look in no particular order (except mine first of course) .  Yes I am checking out the competition – I love developing, but need to get some return on it.  Hence some research on what others are doing.

Update as at: Feb 2012

amr-ical-events-list

  • free at wordpress (4 star rating, 2012 updates)
  • input via  ics file subscription
  • most customisable calendars, agendas, schedules etc, variety of views
  • date navigation and pagination
  • widgets

amr-events

  • paid addon to the above ($40)
  • full event creation, custom post types, taxonomies, locations
  • filtering
  • filters, pluggable functions
  • variety of map plugin integrations
  • multi lingual integration
  • produce ics feeds
  • uses wordpress as intended so you get benefits of being able to integrate other plugins

event espresso ($$$!)

  • lite version at wordpress (3 star rating)
  • paid version not cheap (lots of addons – top price $500, base at $90)
  • registration, ticketing, payment gateways
  • recurring events an addon

all in one event calendar

  • free version at wordpress (5 star rating, 2012 update)
  • is it error prone? (7 brokens for last version, but 13 works)
  • paid support at $120 hour
  • recurring, ics import/export, variety of views, widgets

events manager

  • free version at wordpress (4 star rating, last update 2010/10)
  • paid version $75
  • bookings, paypal
  • free version at wordpress (4 star rating, last update 2012)
  • sounds fairly full featured, views, recurring, customisable
  • user guide at $20
  • free at wordpress (4 star, but last update 2010)

events calendar

  • free version at wordpress (3 star)
  • create and present calendar for events
  • free version at wordpress (3 star, last 2009)
  • event registration

 

 

Posted on

Day of week for historical dates earlier than 1760

One of the ics files that I encountered in testing my events list plugin came from Google and had a “Zero Year” date in it.  There were probably reasons for this and I have to be thankful for the happening –   In looking into it I foundthat the php date format function for day of week $dateobj->format(‘w’);  “breaks” around the year 1760 and starts returning a “-1”.  Since I do have people using my plugin for anniversaries with earlier start dates (It’s not all musical gigs and sporting events!), I felt I needed to cope with it.

I now use the following code, which appears to work when comparing the weekdays using http://www.searchforancestors.com/utility/dayofweek.html

$w = $dateobj->format('w');
if ($w == '-1') $w = get_oldweekdays($dateobj);

function get_oldweekdays ($d) {
   $dummy = new DateTime();
   $dummy = clone ($d);
   date_modify($dummy,'+91500 weeks'); 
   /* add weeks to get us back to a "working" date - 
   a guess from when the date started breaking, plus some extra to be safe */
   $w = $dummy->format('w');
 return($w);
}