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Ask Slashdot: Events Calendar Software For Local Community?
First time accepted submitter hughbar writes "I live in a London suburb that has many activities and classes, yoga, IT [of course], running, art, assorted volunteering and many others. With the help of the local council, we'd now like to make a centralised, searchable database of these, with a number of helpful features: Easy to make submissions, otherwise the whole thing will always be out of date; Web accessible [obviously] but mobile phone friendly as well; Maybe, publish and subscribe, so people can 'subscribe' to yoga listings for example; Handles repeating events, like a classical web calendar; Maybe, can be consolidated with nearby events calendars. I'm aware of MRBS and WebCalendar, but I'm wondering whether there are other suggestions, especially as this is a useful social application. And, yes, I'd like it done with open source, then we can tailor it."
Docs for Non-Profit that is.
You just can't beat their calendar for mobile access and colaboration.
https://civicrm.org/ is extraordinarily powerful for community work. It can deal with any number of different organizing needs from paying for classes to calendaring, from constituent matters to membership sites. Check it out. I'm currently working to make civiCRM work as a law practice management solution. It needs some significant tweaking to make it work for that purpose, but for you needs it will probably work "out of the box" so to speak. Like any major software package it requires setting up, but there a lots of people around the world who have experience setting it up, you can even just pay to get the settings you want.
Though it provides a handful of other features, such as file storage and address books, it has a pretty robust CalDAV management interface, complete with user & group sharing and mobile device support - which is what I've primarily set it up to do for our SME without the need of signing up for Google Apps at $5 a pop.
Hope this helps.
I use multiple google calendars-- one for each kid, my spouse, and for some clubs I'm in. I use Calenmob on my iphone to see them all... but I would love it if there was more software that let you have a club (or class or whatever) add events to your calendar... Seems like a great idea that should have been solved.. but hoping someone here can recommend something.
What you're talking about is similar to Calagator in Portland, OR. The site is http://calagator.org/ and has a link to the source code.
I've been working on such a thing for a smaller scale for just three rural counties. Most of the calendars I've come across are modules in CMSs like Drupal or Joomla, way overkill for a platform and the calendar detail presentation sucks as well as the user entry. Most programmers don't try to understand events.
There are also some web event services out there that are more wide ranging like eventsetter... but they supplement with a lot of ads and you only find a few trees in the global forest of data.
The challenges are (beyond responsive/mobile design and data structure)
- Making a user friendly form where the submission could be directly used by the calendar... I've concluded most of them are useless for the general public (especially here - we may soon crawl out of dialup in some remote parts of our counties!). So the main input is just a text area (preloaded with what needs to be included), which I transcribe into the real form on the admin side. This could be a lot of work for folks doing this for a large suburb, but the results are better as you can standardize the content as you transcode.
- Getting people to submit data. This might be a case of having to get traction before it gets going but even then, people are lazy, even if the 'add info' buttons are in plain sight on just about every page. Currently I do 95% of entries.
So, here's mine - http://www.doplaces.com/ been on-line about six months now (to get a better idea of events go to the calendar, back to december and view, was alot going on then). It also includes a community directory of groups, businesses services and other locations with mucho cross-referencing between those and the events calendar.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Explain to me how it's 2014, and this is the same question that I've been asked since I started my web business in 1992? I'm just plain bored with it. We've had twenty years of web calendars, and forty years of software calendars. I've had enough of the question. What a waste of an entire industry. What good is an industry that can't solve a single basic problem in two decades? I'll be 60 in 25 years. I'll have retired twice, and I'll be consulting for random other companies. I swear my very last project, on my death-bed, will be the very same "we need an event calendar, what should we do?".
Show of hands. How many readers here have built, installed, chosen, spec'd, designed, setup, trained, populated, migrated, or exported an event calendar more than six times? I'm approaching about 150 at this point.
For me, that's not a solution, I want something that doesn't depend/share-data-with a large for-profit. Actually I don't even have a facebook account.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
Not sure what you mean by closer fit.. you could launch a joomla with only the calendar, Jevents is a decent mature app and joomla 3 is small screen capable. You also get the update infrastructure to manage your security and updates. Joomla gets a hard rap around here, but its not that bad when you work with it for a while. I could launch this from start to dns flop over in around 3 hours.