Thread

I am building a site for a small organization that holds classes & events related to teachers.  (Events related to Teacher weblog )  Has anyone built or tried to build anything similar with EE?    If so, I’m curious how it is working for you.

I’ve been wandering the EE forums and Wiki and Train-EE and I’m not seeing a clear cut way of doing this in EE.  Train-ee had an article outlining this….  but I see now Boyink totally gave-up with EE’s calendar function and went with Google Calender.  That’s not a good sign.  Is the EE calendar going to be improved with EE 2.0? 

This is what we’d like an event “calendar” to accomplish:

- Events & Classes are related to Teachers (brief-bios+contact info)
- Events & Classes need custom fields (cost, public/private, open/full ,featured…  )
- Classes need to Repeat ( Repeet ) 
- iCal feeds for the main calendar and individual classes.
- up-coming events are listed on the home page

in addition it’ be nice to…..
- prevent overlapping events
- Open/ Close status for admin to approve events.
- Each category has a page to list classes / events in that category.
- ical feeds for each category.
- events related to rooms or locations
- interface with ticketing APIs like EventBright

Perhaps this is accomplished by avoiding the EE calendar and simply feeding an events weblog to Google Calendar?  (Is this what Boyink did? )  We’d really like to maintain the look and feel of the site…. which is difficult with online event / calendar services.

Thanks!

I went to Google calendar out of frustration of repEEt and DST not playing well together.  Whenever the time changed we had a number of events that would be an hour off.  Not all of them, and I could never figure out why some were fine and some not.  The Google calendar is just embedded into an EE template - I didn’t do any deeper integration.

I’ve heard rumors/rumblings of others building add-on calendars for EE, but until those are announced based on your requirements I’d be looking a some other installed calendar that you could style to match the site.

http://www.helioscalendar.com/ was just brought to my attention and looks decent.

EE’s handling of DST is a pain in the ass 99% of the time and rarely if ever enables you to do anything you actually care about implementing (adjusting entry times to a user’s local time).  I did a custom event calendar with relationships instead of repeet due to performance issues with the plugin… Most of the code was fairly easy, until it came time to get EE to report the times properly due to time zones and DST.  We eventually got it nailed down but it was a huge pain.

I went to Google calendar out of frustration of repEEt and DST not playing well together.  Whenever the time changed we had a number of events that would be an hour off.  Not all of them, and I could never figure out why some were fine and some not.

Was this related to time-zones?  Were the event authors in different time zones?  My client’s events and authors all all in the same time zone…. but even so,  EE’s DST sounds screwy enough to steer well clear of EEs calendar.   

I’ve heard rumors/rumblings of others building add-on calendars for EE

A flexible calendaring system would be a huge competitive advantage for my client’s business .... and would be a big competitive advantage to me as a developer.  I’d throw down several hundred $$ for an event system that WORKS with EE.
 

  http://www.helioscalendar.com/ was just brought to my attention and looks decent.

I’ll check out Helios.  Thanks for the info!

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Was this related to time-zones?  Were the event authors in different time zones?

No, and no.

And I’m not sure I’d be so quick to say it’s “EE’s screwy DST”—more repEEt and how it worked with EE and DST.

How do you get a google calendar to appear on an Expression Engine site?

Google generates the code - just an iFrame based approach.  Just drop that into an EE template.

Solspace also recently released a full calendar module:
http://www.solspace.com/software/detail/calendar/