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#612 Event Management

Parent Category:
DPCalendar
Category:
Introduction
Last Updated:
Allon Moritz, Monday, 27 May 2024 08:33
Created:
Friday, 17 February 2012 20:44
Hits:
19435

Introduction

The core part of DPCalendar are events. Everything in DPCalendar is related to them. An event in DPCalendar is always attached to a calendar and has a date and/or time of action. It can be a single event or a series of events and can be synchronized on every device which supports the CalDAV protocol or iCal imports. The interface to manage the events is clean and responsive and allows the administrator to edit them in the front or back end. For a better SEO performance, you can add meta data attributes to each event to improve your search engine ranking.

Every event must have an unique alias within the calendar, these alias are used as url links.

Events list

Events can be managed in the backend. Various filters allow to search for a specific event. Also batch editing is supported in the event list view and setting the state of an event. Columns can be hidden through the columns dropdown on the right side of the table.

Events list

Event editing frontend

To create an event in the frontend, you must click on a day in the calendar. A popup window will appear where you are able to add the most needed event details. It allows you to navigate to the full event form. The same form is displayed as on the back end where you can control all the fields an event has, including the recurring settings and inline location creation. The only difference is the tabs rendering as this is tailored to DPCalendar because of templates which do render forms on the front special.

When you want to edit an event you must first open the event that you want to edit. An edit icon will appear on the top left corner, and when clicked you will be taken to the event editing page. As shortcut, you can also click on the edit link in the tooltip or there is mostly an edit icon beside the event in the list views.

DPCalendar supports drag'n drop and resizing of events to quickly change time slots and dates of an event within the calendar view.

For all editing actions you need sufficient permissions.

Event edit in front end

Event editing backend

In the backend of the DPCalendar, you can create or edit events just like you do in Joomla articles. In the backend of this Joomla event management extension, it is also possible to create recurring events when you want an event repeated in your calendar.

Event attributes

All events have the following attributes that can be modified:

  • Title
    A short description of the event. Can contain HTML code or emojis.
  • Alias
    Must be unique within the calendar and is needed to create SEF urls. As default, the alias is created in a proper url format from the title.
  • Calendar
    The calendar that the event belongs to.
  • Url
    If there is an url for the event.
  • Description
    The detailed description of the event. The system default wysiwyg editor is used as form field.
  • Schedule
    An unlimited list of schedules for the event.
  • Images
    The intro image is used for list vies or modules where a smaller image can be defined for a fast page load. The full image is used in the details page in the header and can be of large size. Every image can have an alt attribute and a caption value. The caption will be rendered as figcaption tag while the image is always in a figure tag.
  • Status
    Your are probably familiar with the various states of an article in Joomla. You can publish, unpublished, archive, cancel and trash any event.
    Canceled events are displayed on the front but with a special text, marked as canceled. If an event is unpublished and the logged in user is the author of it, then it will be displayed as well.
  • Access
    Who has permission to see your event. Check the ACL page for more information.
  • Access content
    Who has permission to view the full content of the event. Check the ACL page for more information on this.
  • Language
    The language the event belongs to if you have a multilingual site.
  • Locations
    Where does the event occur. Every event can be attached to multiple locations. If a location doesn't exist, the user can create the location directly on the event edit mask.
  • Rooms
    The rooms where the event is happening.
  • Color
    The color of the event. If it is empty the color of the calendar is taken.
  • Version Note
    If the event is saved you can leave a version note which will appear in the versions view.
  • Tags
    Define some Joomla tags for the event.
  • Basic Options
    The basic options do define settings for the event details page on an event level. As default they are set to inherited, so they are used from the menu item configurations or the global DPCalendar options.
Event edit in back end

Date Handling

Every event has a start date and end date. An event can also be marked as full day event. The show "Show end time" flag, does define if the end time should be shown within DPCalendar. You still have to set an end time, but it will not being shown. The end date is needed as DPCalendar offers export endpoints for events like iCal or CalDAV where an end date is mandatory.

Series

The recurrence scheduling options allow to create a series of events. Events can be scheduled daily, weekly, monthly or annually. For your convenience you can create rules for the most used patters through the web interface without writing down the rrule by your self in the expert options.

Keep in mind that when editing the original event of a series and the start/end dates/times or recurrence rule are modified, then all series events are recreated with new id's. When there are instances of the series edited individually and the original event is modified, then DPCalendar asks the author on save if the individual events should get overwritten which are modified outside of the series.

The Until attribute defines the end date for recurring events. Editing of the original event means that all recurring events in the series that belong to this event will be updated and recreated after save. This means all changes in a recurring event will be lost.

You are also able to set exceptions. The interval means that the event is created every n'th time. For example, on a daily event when the interval is 3, the event will be repeated every 3rd day. The repeat count setting means that the event will be repeated 'x' amount of times till the until the specified end date.

The excluding dates list defines the dates on which no series event should be created, like holidays, etc.

The following list explains the frequency of the recurring pattern setting:

  • Daily
    For daily events, weekend exceptions can be defined. This means that the recurring event is only entered for weekdays but not on weekends.
  • Weekly
    For weekly recurring events, you are able to set which weekday the event should occur on. For example, every Wednesday.
  • Monthly
    For monthly occurring events, you are able to set which day of the month the event should occur on. For example, 19th of each month, or the last Friday of each month.
  • Annually (Yearly)
    For annual occurring events, you are able to set which date of the year the event should occur on. For example, 19th June each year.

The expert options allows you to specify complex recurring patterns of an event. The recurring pattern must follow the rules of the iCalendar standard. This allows you to define complex recurring patterns like Every 3 months on the 10th till 15th of the month for 10 occurrences. To learn more about the full power of Ical rules, read this article with useful examples.

The date and time format of the date input fields are taken from the event dat/time format parameter in the DPCalendar options.

Event recurring options

Other Options

The location and booking setup is separated in it's own tab. We have dedicated chapters in our documentation for them where we cover the settings there. For DPCalendar, the images, publishing, basic and meta data options are the same as those in Joomla articles.

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