Will they come?

It seems strange to me that there isn’t a super slick solution for calendaring/events management tasks within Wordpress. When we first developed the Tamworth Library site we used (correct me if I’m wrong) phpiCalendar and Google Calendar. The library’s Children’s Librarian would login into their Events Google Calendar and enter upcoming events and that would automatically populate the site’s sidebar as well as the full calendar view.

It worked beautifully when it worked, but with many potential points of failure it sometimes didn’t. And it was complicated enough so that troubleshooting when it did fail was a process. Because the events were managed completely outside the content of the blog, the only way upcoming events where provided via the blog’s rss feed was if the librarians entered it in both places. Since part of the objective of the site is to make life easier for patrons and librarians alike, this was far from perfect.

My hopes and dreams for an events calendar seem pretty simple to me and not at all uncommon:

1. The library has both regular open hours and special events and programs. I had been handling this with two separate calendars. I wanted both to show in the sidebar.
2. I wanted the sidebar section headings, Hours and Upcoming Events, to open a full calendar view that would combine both calendars but retain the look and feel of the library’s overall website.



3. I wanted the a specific event on the sidebar to open more detailed information about that event.
4. A user should be able to access and use the calendar information as they like whether it’s blogging it or adding it to their local calendar wholesale or event-by-event. Or anything else they want to do with it - it needs to follow Web 2.0 standards and encourage remixing.
5. *Bonus* Allow for patron registrations. In Google Calendar-ese, allow folks to invite themselves up to a certain number.

A couple weeks ago events stopped showing in the sidebar, I couldn’t figure out why, and I resolved to find another solution. If anyone has one, I’d love to hear it.