If you have ever worked with sites that deal with events, you’ve probably been asked to create some type of calendar display. In this article, we’ll discuss how to set up a basic events calendar using the Calendar (8.x-1.x-dev) for WordPress maintenance support plans 8.
Configure the event content type
In our example, to handle events, we create a new content type called Event. You can put any content type in a calendar as long as it has a Date field. Though we might need date ranges to handle multi-day events, at the time of writing this article, there is no support for using the date range field with the calendar plugin, so we will use a simple date field for this example.
The Event node form. Right now, events only have a title, description and a date field labelled Schedule.
Configuring the “events” view
With the node type in place, the next step will be to display the nodes using a view, using calendar display settings. To create a view with the calendar settings in place, you can go to Structure > Views > Add view from template page (admin/structure/views/template/list). Here, we choose the template which allows us to create a calendar for our date field.
We click the Add button corresponding to the date field (which we called Schedule).
The template provides you some options to configure certain aspects of the calendar to be generated, namely:
View name
Description
Base view path: The base path to use for the calendar pages and tabs. In our example, we choose events as the base so the calendar will generate paths like:
events/day: For a day-wise view
events/week: For a week-wise view
events/month: For a month-wise view
events/year: For a year-wise view
From the views configuration page, we can also configure the path for our calendar page(s) and create blocks with mini-calendars.
Some settings for the calendar to be generated.
Once done fine-tuning, we save the view and visit the relevant front-end page, which in this example is events/month. Here’s how the calendar looks out of the box with the Bartik theme.
Conclusion
The calendar plugin will be a great contrib plugin while working with calendars. However, it may or may not serve your needs depending on your project requirements. Here are certain points (at the time of writing this article) which might affect the usability of this plugin:
No support for date range: Lack of support for date ranges makes it hard to work with multi-day event scenarios.
No support for start & end date: Though we can setup two separate date fields for start and end date, multi-day events are not visible as multi-column rows in the calendar.
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