I'm Claudia Snell & I build Websites

WordPress as Campus Calendar

While I was working at Nichols College, I built an events calendar mini-site to display all campus events; by department and campus wide. The challenge was to find something that fit our needs:
-Simple / Easy but Flexible and Expandable-
Easy for us to develop – We needed to be able to customize the calendar easily and inexpensively. It needed to be easy to build, implement and expand.
Easy to update – There’s nothing worse than having to saddle people with another complicated system. It’s the best way to make sure your project will fail in the long run. The users will refuse to adopt it if its too hard to use.

-Basic-
We just wanted to display events details – not manage every aspect of scheduling on the campus. We’ve got stuff to do that already. ‘Off the shelf’ calendaring systems tend to have ‘kitchen-sinkitis’ – they do EVERYTHING, even wash your car I think. But it’s just too much for what we needed. Why pay for an expensive product when most of the functionality is overkill?

-Enter WordPress-
The solution I chose was to build a custom WordPress theme.  It provided all the flexibility and simplicity I needed with the added bonus of being open source with a great community around it. I was able to build what we needed in-house and at virtually no cost (other than my time).

Using WordPress this way did present me with a few interesting challenges though.

As (mostly) everyone knows, WordPress was originally built to be a blogging platform.  As such, it has certain ideas about which order content should be displayed in – that being the traditional chronological, latest first. I needed it to display in order of when the events will occur.

To get WordPress to act like a calendar, I used custom fields and custom queries. The custom field provides a sort date. The queries display the posts based on those sort dates. Simple – and works great.

To create individual department calendars, I used WordPress categories. All events default to a ‘main calendar’ category which populates the home page & campus-wide RSS feed. Users can select the appropriate department as secondary categories. To create the individual calendar pages, I built category pages for each department. Having individual category pages with custom sidebars allows each area to customize their department calendar for their needs and audience.

Another use of categories and custom queries is custom messages. We needed to be able to flag certain events as ‘students only’ or ‘faculty only’, etc. By selecting the appropriate category on entry, custom messages will appear within the entry. The added functionality makes things easier for staff as they maintain their calendars.

In addition, I have added custom fields for the event details. Staff can choose the detail (time, place, name, URL) and enter the information. The template automatically formats the information on the site so that it is clear, consistent and predictable.

For the content owners:
To make maintenance easier for my users, I (lightly) adjusted the admin template. I added custom messages to remind them of tips and pointers. The benefit has been a very streamlined, easy to update and manage system that was easy to train people to use and very well received. I haven’t needed to spend more than 15 minutes with any individual on training. In a busy environment, that is a huge bonus.

For the site visitors:
Visitors to the site can see all events coming for the next two weeks or they can select one of the department calendars to see that sub-set. I’ve also provided category RSS so visitors can subscribe to get the events they are interested in.

The best part for me has been all the feedback from everyone on campus. I’m hearing that they really like the calendar and that it helps them a lot. That’s the best feedback a site designer can get.

Go check it out.