Calendar Plugin

[MadtownLems]

With the recent advent of Post Types, I've been expecting a new awesome calendar plugin to take the WP world by storm... but I haven't seen anything that fits the bill yet.

We're looking for a quality, robust, free event calendaring plugin for our MU installs.

The most common response I've gotten from people is:
Event Calendar - http://wpcal.firetree.net/

But the last post on their site is almost a year old, and the last version is well over a year old.

There's got to be something newer/better/better-maintained, right?

What have you seen, used, heard about, or recommend?

Thanks!

[Ryan]

Welcome to the forum :)

AFAIK there are no good calendar plugins for WordPress. I ended up resorting to Google Calendar to do the job. It's not as slick as an integrated system but at least the darn thing works ... http://dunedinicehockey.co.nz/calendar/

[illuminea]

There really is a lack of calendar plugins in WordPress. A potential client of ours chose to go with Joomla instead because it has such a robust calendar built in.

Over a year ago we wrote a review of calendar plugins here: http://wpgarage.com/plugins/wordpress-calendar-plugins/. Someone just left a comment yesterday about a new calendar plugin they developed: http://www.kinocreative.co.uk/wordpr...for-wordpress/. I haven't tried it so I don't know how it is.

I did find a solution that I like more than anything else I've seen so far, which involves making each event its own entry, and using custom fields to identify the date of an event: http://www.problogdesign.com/wordpre...s-events-list/.

[Ryan]

Yeah, I've considered doing something like that myself. The idea was to write a plugin which displayed a list of posts sorted into a calendar style format (added via a shortcode). I decided that was too much work though considering all the finicky details that would need to be accounted for and so went with Google Calendar instead. Custom post types would be a logical use of this I think.

[JLeuze]

I think good calendar plugins are a really weak area of WordPress unfortunately. It seems like most of the business sites that I do want a calendar or event listing and I have never found one that I really like.

I have used Event Calendar 3 in the past and had nothing but problems with it.

My favorite calendar plugin so far is GigPress, but it is only geared towards musicians. I'd love a generic "EventPress" version.

I have recently used a calendar plugin called The Events Calendar which I think has a lot of potential. It works really well and has both calendar and event listing views, and it also is built to integrate with EventBrite.

In the future I think I will keep using this plugin, but it is a little tricky to integrate it nicely into your theme so I'd like to see some more good options.

[Jeffro]

Heh, with all the poo poo over Core Plugins, I bet this one would get some fanfare if it were selected to be one.

[Ryan]

If there's no developers for a regular plugin, do you think making it core would actually help or hinder it? I suspect it would just remove motivation for anyone to create a competing calendar plugin and we'd end up back in the same rut.

[Jeffro]

maybe get a couple people involved in creating one awesome calendar plugin instead of 3 sub par ones. That is one of the goals behind the whole idea of core plugins. But, unless there was a lot of interest shown throughout the community for a calendar or event scheduling plugin, there is no reason to do that. Plus, core plugins appear to be taking much longer to get off the ground anyways.

[Ryan]

It just seems to me in that situation that you would end up with three sub-par plugins rolled into one big fat sub-par one.

Most of the core plugin discussion I've heard has mainly been about things like Twitter widgets which there are bazillions of and many quite good ones. So the core one would provide the bulk of the functionality people require to build off of.

That's quite a different concept IMO from creating a plugin since there wasn't any suitable ones originally.

[JLeuze]

A calendar plugin would be a pretty good candidate for a core plugin. But most of the sites I get requests to add calendars to are for small businesses, so a good commercial plugin could probably be sucessful.