Building a Dynamic Event Calendar with SiteCM

SiteCM has a lot of great components available to our clients. A really popular one is the events calender; I am often asked how it works and it really is quite simple and easy and exciting to use.

The first step would be to create a page in the pages section of the manager that visitors to your site will go to so they can find out all about the wonderful events your organization is holding. On this events page we are going to insert a drop-in application for the events calendar.

We'll select whether we would like a list of the events for that month or the events displayed on a calendar and the category of events that we would like to display (this is a handy feature for showing internal events and community events on separate calendars) click update and viola! A blue box that says events calendar.

Impressed? I thought you would be. But wait there's more...

We will give our page a title, filename and decide where in the navigation we want it to appear and then visit the save tab where we will see our new event calendar in the preview. Now we can save and launch it! That is it. In theory you will never have to touch this page again your events calendar will always display the current months events based on the options you just decided. Pretty neat huh.

Now comes the fun part. Creating the events.

We will visit the Assets > Events Calendar back in the manager this is where all of our event creation and editing will take place.

I am going to 'Add New Event' and a popup editor is going to let me add all the pertinent information about my event.

The first tab is my description where all the fancy jazzy cool stuff goes. This includes, and is not limited to, my letting the world know about all the very important people who will be attending and speaking at my event, what sort of informative and innovative things are going to be taking place and a picture of last years event just to remind everyone about how much fun it was.  Keep in mind you can also leave the description completely blank. It is entirely up to you.

After I have thoroughly explained the goings on we can move on to the schedule tab. This tab is where we will select the date(s) our event is on and it's duration. If we have an event that is for the entire month of June but only on Tuesdays we can do that too! We can simply select a date range of June 1- June 30 and then at the bottom where I select my occurrence and put a tick box in Tuesday. We can put as many dates into the schedule tab as needed but we need to have at least one in order for our event to appear on the calendar and save correctly.

In the next tab called the properties tab we need to define some of the finer details of the event such as its name and where it is taking place. We also need to specify a category for the event to appear in. You will remember that when we put the Event Calendar DropIn on our page we also chose a category.

When we have filled in all of the information there is nothing left to do but save! On the save tab we have the same options as for many of our other SiteCM pages. When we choose save & launch that saves the event and launches it to live. Now you can see your new event on the front end of the events page we created earlier!