The plugin is Events Manager Pro and more documentation is available on their site
Events are submitted via InsideLaw by anyone. Unless submitted by someone with "event_publish" permissions, the event is placed in "pending" awaiting approval.
General information about tagging and categorizing can be found in our Best Practices.
Note that "College Events" is intended only for events that are sponsored by the college and have widespread appeal, such as the Miller Lecture or a symposium.
Locations
The Events Manager manages locations. When a visitor/student/faculty submits and event, they are only able to select from a drop-down list of locations (other than those marked "Private").
Event editors and admin get a location box that will pop-up a list of matching locations when they start typing a location.
Care must be exercised to start typing the location in the least specific way in order to make the selector list efficient. For example, all the rooms in the old building are labeled "Urban Life", so if an editor starts typing "UL", no matches will be found. The most effective way to search is with the room number, i.e. "170".
Hiding Locations from the event submission drop-down list
If a location should not show up on the selector list for the public, the location should have its "Publish" "Visibility" set to "Private" in the admin panel "Dashboard" / "Events" / "Locations". Locations and the events held there will still be otherwise visible on InsideLaw.
Embeds in public sites
- For the law.gsu.edu calendar, events must be tagged "public"
- CLHS embeds their events via the category "clhs"
- The Tax Clinic uses category "taxclinic" to pull events to their site
Note that events are not fed out if there is any "Access Restriction" in place. There no way to authenticate (i.e. log in) via a calendar feed, so all "protected" events are restricted from other sites and iCal feeds in general.
Locations
The Events Manager supports locations. If a location is set "private," it still appears in events and all events in that location can be viewed/listed, but the location will not appear in the selector for submitting events. This is useful for those locations where we have events, but do not handle the reservation of those rooms via the Events Manager.
Creating new locations should be very limited, as the list will get quite cluttered and we will lose all the usefulness of checking for all events in a given room. Only admins can create new locations, and it is the responsibility of admins to avoid creating duplicate location entries.
Shortcodes
Events Manager Pro has several shortcodes, the most useful are:
- events_list - attributes include a comma-delimited "category" to specify what is included
- event_form - to allow front-end submissions
- categories_list - Displays a list of event categories.
Issues / To Do
- The location management system does not check for double booking.
- Past events are shown in search results - frequent deletion of old events needed (move to trash in order to keep for historical purposes) - Perhaps automate???
- Category assignments are not consistent - usually, too many categories are set - many categories are not well-used.
- Bulk editing allows setting a category, but not clearing/removing a category.
- Importing our entire class schedule may overload the system, so we are using Booking Calendar.
Future Features(?)
- "Shared" events where more than one person can log in and edit and/or access bookings.
- Specially-crafted identifying links to pull even protected events into iCal feeds (ala Office 365 and Google Calendar).
Tech details
The iCal feed is produced by a script tied to the theme (unfortunately). The script does an undue amount of processing to prevent illegal characters, etc.
/var/www/wordpress/wp-content/themes/sass-wordpress-bootstrap-col/plugins/events-manager/templates/ical.php
Planning considerations (archive)
Current plan is to have all events submitted and approved in insidelaw, with a certain tagged subset of these events being automatically fed out to the public site.
The University chose All-in-One Event Calendar - which has many problems[1]
We are using Events Manager - more stable, more features, and the problems listed on the support board are of much less severity.
So, students, faculty and staff will submit events via insidelaw. Robin will approve events and ensure the room is booked properly. Events needing technical support will be tagged so that support personnel will have a subset calendar of those events (could even feed to Outlook!).