Do You Need Calendar View for Toolset?

   Amir

Announcements

June 27, 2019
128

For a long time clients have been asking how to show content from Views on a calendar. We’re finally starting with this project now and we want to make sure that we build what you need.

We understand the general concept. For example, if you’re creating a website for events, you’d want to show events as a calendar. The View will add “events” to a calendar and visitors can zoom in to a specific week or day and see the events in this period.

However, we’re not so sure that this is all.

If you need to build calendar-based sites in the near future, can you leave your comments and describe exactly how you’d like it to work and look?

Together with your explanations, if you can give links to existing sites, that would be great.

Looking forward to your feedback!

 

Comments 128 Responses

  1. Events can have Images that are displayed in the calendar
    Click the event and a window opens to display the details

  2. Hi, I need a calendar for my costumers to book appointment, is you project will help me ?

    • Could you give us some examples of sites that do this and how you’d like it to look?

        • Most likely, we’re not going to implement something like the entire MS Booking. Could you show us what you’re trying to build and some example sites that do this today?

  5. Fantastic!
    I organize an event that lasts three days: I would therefore need a visualization that separates the events in the three days, without obviously displaying the other days when the event does not exist.

  6. I have a mobile dj company and I would like to be able to make a custom “booking” post type. I have to be able to put in the date, start time and end time, and it should be displayed on the calendar. Since I book multiple dj’s on the same date, it should be possible to display those as well.

    The dj’s and the clients should also both be able to log on to the site and see only their bookings on the calendar, and click a booking on the calendar to see the details.

    Finally, it should be possible to sync the Toolset calendar with Google calendar and Outlook calendar.

  7. Hi, we may have a not so common request for our genealogy website, but a timeline with all the entries would be nice.
    Where you can Filter by date, month, year and see the result in either a horizontal timeline or a vertical timeline (like facebook).
    Of course with customization – with preview images, text excerpts etc from all the custom post types.

    • Sounds fair. Can you show us examples on other sites that do something like this already?

  9. Here you will find what I realized: initially all the appointments were on the same page, but it became too heavy and caused the site to collapse, so each day was divided into a differrent page.
    In addition to the aesthetic part (I am not a webdesigner) there is also a theme linked to forms, because the one who proposes the events must be able to select the date only among the three available and therefore I could not use a date field but a text field.
    https://falacosagiusta.org/la-fiera/i-primi-dieci-anni/edizione-2019/programma-culturale/

  13. GREAT!

    I want to build a site that has event custom posts listed on a calendar view.

    View should be configurable to display as a day (broken into 15 min slots), week and month (broken into daily slots).

    Each of those events needs to be displayed as a clickable link that takes the user through to the individual post.

    The date + time of the listed calendar events should be in the users LOCAL time.

    If possible would like to have the listed calendar events filterable i.e. able to only show events of a certain category, certain tag, a certain author or between certain dates + times.

    • Thanks for the detailed explanation. Are there sites that do something close to this?

      • To put it simply:

        I want ToolSet Calendar Views that approximate what we can do in Drupal Calendar Views.

        I invested into ToolSet on the promise that ToolSet was the WordPress equivalent to Drupal Views.

  14. I know it’s asking an awful lot, but the EventOn Calendar has a wide range of features (even on the basic model) so it would be nice to see these options regarding displaying events. Either way I would suggest a look at it for some ideas…

    https://demo.myeventon.com/

    I would like to suggest:
    Navigate by month, week, day (and perhaps year) with a view of each while using the nav arrows.
    Display the calendar events as a list or calendar
    Link from calendar events to a CPT
    Display the CPT as a dropdown within the calendar view
    Allow color coded event categories (for course types etc)
    A search option if possible
    Multi-day bookings and displays (for equipment rental, education classes etc)
    Option to not double book (if possible)
    Allow multiple events or entry on a single day or over days
    Be BS4 ready if possible
    An option for repeating events if possible

    I know that most of this can be done using Toolset and inserting fields.

  15. Hi,

    That sounds great! We’ll use this new functionality on at least two of our sites.

    There are some features that we found indispensable on a web calendar, some are not obvious at the beginning, but they become necessary sooner or later. I’m listing from more important to less:

    – Multi-day events. The ability to have events with a duration longer than 1 day represented on the calendar. The right way to enter these events would be to choose a Start date and time and a End date and time, being able to pick different days, not only different times in the same day.

    – Multiple events on the same day.

    – Recurrent events. The ability to create events that repeat every year, like birthdays, and every week day. This is a little tricky as you have to define a limit because there are a lot of combinations possible for recurrent events, like last day of every month, first monday of june, etc. For us, a year (birthday like) and every week day (every saturday for exemple) repetition is necessary and enough.

    – Labels when hover over events in month view. When having the calendar on month view and the calendar is in a reduced zone it’s sometimes difficult to show the title of the event inside the day box. A good solution is to show the full title on a floating label when doing hover on the event item.

    My advice is to copy as many things that you can from Google Calendar, it is by far the most complete and user friendly calendar you can find.

    Good luck with the coding!

      • I would like to second everything Toni said above. I have been using Tribe Events Calendar on multiple WordPress sites for years. There are many things I love about it and many things I wish were vastly improved. A feature that I’m dying for is the ability to create recurrent events and have control over exactly how often the reoccur and how they show up in a calendar view.

        I also feel that it’s very important that a calendar is not limited to a single classic “calendar” view. I work on city/tourism websites, and most users tend to prefer a weekly view or a list of upcoming events over a monthly overview. Plus the ability to search, filter, and jump to a certain month/day/week (usually with Ajax). Take a look at The Events Calendar Showcase to see how versatile their plugin can be design-wise.

        Another events thing: the ability to easily manipulate date format depending on these factors:
        – the event is on a single day with a start & end time
        – the event is all day
        – the event spans multiple days (with a start & end time)
        – the event spans multiple days (all day)
        – the event is all month
        – the event spans multiple months/years
        – the event started before today and is ongoing

        You can see a little bit of this versatility on one of my events calendars. Even if this is a feature that can only be configured with PHP, it is essential.

        If you guys can create the perfect booking/appointment calendar, I could cry. Here are some features that I’m dying for:
        – universal check in/check out times & a view on the calendar that reflects overnight stays adequately (the slanted color overlay on top of the square for overnight stays)
        – timeslots that multiple people can sign up for (I have a dog trainer client that desperately needs a simple way for people to book her group classes)
        – as much calendar syncing as possible with Google, iCal, Outlook, etc.
        – global rules for multiple bookable resources (setting dates where rates are higher; WooCommerce Bookings has some of this functionality but they lack the global settings & having to go through every resource one by one and set the same rules is so time consuming)

        I am sure there are other features that I can’t think of right now, so I will start making a list somewhere. This is a tremendous undertaking, but with you guys really considering all this feedback, I have high hopes that you could nail it.

        Thanks a million!

  16. The core functionality should be a widget like calendar for the sidebar with Ajax switching between months. Whenever we click on a date where there is one event we would directly go to that post.

    Whenever we click on a date with more than one event we would go to archive page with a list of the Events.

    Then there should be a larger calendar that features the titles of the events directly. This calendar can be used in a page.

    —

    I think this should be about it yet. The rest people mention here is often not in the scope of a calendar. A calendar is not a booking system. You can easily create a booking system already with toolset.

    An example site I use sich a calendar on: http://www.dghd.de

    Thanks.

  17. Hi Amir,

    1. Calendar for Appointments:
    – clients can book an appointment, admin can see new notifications badge on the calendar day. ( e.g 5 clients booked an appointment for the same day 10.10.2019, admin can see 5 new notifications on 10.10.2019 calendar cell, and mark as seen, read, approved or snooze).
    – Calendar should work instantly and not refresh by navigating between months.

    2. Admin/Client can filter events/appointment based on date picker
    – filter by date
    – filter events between days
    – filter event by admin/user
    -filter by attendees

    3. Notifications
    – Clients and Admins get reminder notifications depends on the day of the event/appointment (e.g a user can subscribe to an event and get notified before the event and in the same day of the event).

    4- Designing the Calendar
    – building and designing the view of the Calendar should be fully controlled.
    – Each cell of the calendar should be able to be designed and customized as well.

    I am quiet sure some things i mentioned above exist already with toolset forms, they just need to integrate well with calendars.

    I hope this helps.

    Thank you

  18. Post Expiry with notifications. Working with time inside of Toolset makes my brain gooey. I’d love to create an event post, that automatically took itself down after 12 months. With a notification to admin, at 11 months, hey admin, this post is coming down.

    • We currently have a TTL option in Forms, though I never used it I think it takes care of post expiry based on time. (You just define how long the post will stay published before being drafted when creating a new custom post type creation Form).

  19. I’m building a space/storage/room rental directory. Potential bookers need to be able to visually see busy and already booked dates and times as blocked out /unbookable – maybe colour coded? I’d also love to be able to display links to custom posts and woocommerce products based on category and featured status.

    • Thanks. Can you show us sites that are doing this today, so we can see how it looks and works?

      • http://demo.wpdevart.com/demo-booking-calendar/

        This is a simplistic example of a booking calendar, though they have two flavours – one to book days at a time, and one to book hours at a time on a certain day.

        My application requires both – multiple spaces are available within a venue and can be viewed and booked independently on the same calendar.

        So the calendar must be able to be ‘drilled down’ from year to month, to day, to hour and parts thereof and link to any bookable product and or/custom post type in these contexts.

        Click and drag to select multiple blocks of time would also be handy, as well as the ability for a user to shift the whole selected time block to the next fully available dates.

  20. I would like a calendar where you can select dates by selecting “YEAR” and “MONTH” only, so I can filter dates for an entire month.

  21. This is great news, would love to be able to use Toolset instead of a third party events plugin.

    Here are some suggestions…

    The ability to display events in a calendar view like this with filter options – https://www.visitthemalverns.org/whats-on/event-finder/

    Or in a list view like this – https://www.visitthemalverns.org/whats-on/event-finder/malvern-theatres-events/

    The ability to set multi-day events, recurring events, to hide event times (or just the end time), to display events for the next XX days etc, to filter by date range, in list view the option to display multi-day events each day or just once with the date range displayed (e.g. 25th – 27th June).

    Hope that helps!

  22. Hi Amir
    This will be a valuable addition to Toolset, I’m sure. I’ve read much of what’s been suggested and would just like to offer a suggestion which would really help us.

    Our interest is to use it for scheduling remote audio interviews with candidates. At the moment it is done using a rather cumbersome connection of Google Calendar, Appointment Core (for scheduling) and Zoom (for recording interviews).

    This way, candidates can pick their interview slot according to when an interviewer is free.

    It would be way better to replace Appointment Core with functionality in Toolset Calendar, but to do that it should be able to…

    1. Integrate with multiple users’ Google Calendars (interviewers), or let them choose the dates/times they’re free (per user).

    2. Set a time slot as taken when a candidate selects it.

    3. (ideally) Integrate with Zoom to set an interview URL for that meeting.

    Well done with all you’re doing. Toolset is truly great!
    Best wishes
    Tim

  24. Hi!
    I’ve built a holiday accomodation rental site with Toolset. It went live just recently. Users sign up via a Toolset form and add their “Objects” (a CPT created in Toolset) themselves via another Toolset form.
    The trickiest thing was to find a calendar where the user in an easy way could fill in periods of dates (booked or available) for each object. I ended up picking the WP Simple Booking Calendar, but with that you need an admin to “connect” a calendar via the calendars post ID to each Object and after that let the user access the WP backend separately to add/edit dates.
    I would have been better if a Toolset calender had been included with the Object so it could have been accessed directly in the add/edit frontend forms for the object, and had the similar time periods and “legend/color” features, as well.
    There is a free version of the WP Simple Booking Calendar if you want to check it out.
    Take a look at my site! (Sorry only in Swedish.)

    https://hyrboendegotland.se/boende/fin-tvaa-i-lugnt-omrade/

    • That’s very helpful. Thanks for the detailed explanation and the link to your site.

  25. Dear Amir,

    This is a great initiative.

    I believe the calendar function should allow for the following:
    1. Manual input of date
    2. Visual input of date
    3. Associated input of time for each calendar instance (including the option to have no time inputed)
    4. Time must allow 12hr or 24 hour format.

    The key in my view is having the capacity to have a Start Date / Time and an End Date / TIme. One should be able to calculate duration based on these two or more values.

    The smoothest client side implementation of a date and time functionality that I have seen is from the http://www.eventsframe.com website. I have screen captures that I will send you as follow-up to this comment via email.

    I think the critical elements are:
    1. Visual Calendar that also permits manual date entry; selection of the format of date i.e. dd/mm/yyyy vs mm/dd/yyyy would be adviseable
    2. Ability to associate a time with a particular date entry – and time should be able to extend from days : hours : minutes : seconds . milliseconds for sport specific applications
    3. Time should have 12hr and 24 hr format
    4. Time and date will require a timezone select field – particularly given the international nature of the web
    5. We have to think that end users would want to be be able to determine what each date and time entry means (i.e. start time, end time, interval time, intermediate time)

    On the end user viewing side we need to be able to see the items for which we have assigned dates and times in either a table format or a calendar view format (a la google calendar)

  26. This is very helpful, thanks for starting this project.

    The strength of WP-Toolset is the ability to create any number of custom fields that you need and the relationships allows for beautiful connectivity between events that are created. I wouldn’t suggest therefore that WP-Toolset create a custom type “Event” with preset fields, because everbody’s events are different, but it would be very helpful if you could create various standard calendar views to serve up information easier.

    Also extend the capabilities of some of your standard fields such as the Date Time field which does not allow for the selection of a Time Zone, which is important in a calendaring system.

    Calendaring systems offer month, year, week, day views as well as listings. It is also important to allow for recurring events, and extra field type would be helpful needed for this.

    It might be good also to make it easier to connect/import/export to/with feeds from outside calendaring systems like Google or Apple as this is another typical feature in calendaring. A user should be able to download calendar feeds into their favorite calendaring system.

    With WP-Toolset Forms and Commerce tools, you are also set up well to potentially collect payment for events and allow people to submit events for approval, etc…

    A lot of potential here!

    • Can you tell us about a project that you need to build and what it should have? If you can show us some existing sites that do the same as you need, it would be great.

      • Hey Amir,
        I am actually redoing our calendar trying to use WP-Toolset as it is currently. I will not be using a “calendar” view, but simply listing events by creating a custom “event” post type. Our parent organization recently went through a new web calendaring system overhaul which will eventually come down to us.

        Some of the standard issues I am running into using WP-Toolset now are:
        Time Zone and corresponding 12/24 hour format capabilities in the Date/Time field (the time zone would need to be displayed next to the time in the event page as well)
        Recurring event capabilities

        Some of the things WP-Toolset does well already:
        Custom fields (because everyone has different informational needs)
        Views and shortcodes allows robust custom calendar views in many places on a website
        Ability to suggest related calendaring events through relationships or with tags and category designations
        Forms allows for a response from users (RSVP, etc…)
        The ability to create custom taxonomy types allows for more robust tagging and categorizing
        WP-Toolset Maps will allow you to create a map connection

        Some of the calendaring needs from a large organizational structure with many small units:
        Distributed access management for events created by smaller units under a larger parent. Events submitted are approved by a super-user in each unit. (WP-Toolset Access)
        Ability for smaller units and individuals within the organization to submit events for review by a units super-user. (WP-Toolset Forms)
        Ability to have people register to attend, RSVP or make payments (Forms and Commerce?)
        Ability to export events (.ICS) as well as export the calendar (Google/Apple account connections)
        Ability to import events (Importer Custom Fields Pro?)
        Show related events based on event type or category designation
        Ability to create private events or events that only show under certain parameters
        Be able to list archived events (past events listing)
        Ability to organize events under increasing levels of macro units as specified by a unit’s super-user
        Create custom calendar views based on web location for each macro unit
        A connection to Google Maps to allow for directions (WP-Toolset Maps)

        The booking component is used by us and other units, but we are using a special tool for this. You would need to allow fields that specified the amount of resources (rooms, seats, offices, etc…) and time slot’s for the user to choose, as well as more advanced scheduling capabilities such as the admin to say what hours, days, months each individual resource or grouping of resources are available. Also you would need to ask a user how many people are reserving and set a reservation cap for each resource or offer resources that fit the group size. And even be able to offer different configurations based on group size, which would mean resources may need to be adaptable. I would give you extra kudos if you tackle this.

        Another big issue for us is accessibility as we are under government mandate to have our website 100% accessible. I am having to fix issues with WP-Toolsets, specifically when using form elements. For instance your form labels don’t have “for” attributes and not all your fields have an “id” assigned. Whatever you create for this, please make accessibility a key issue as well. It is becoming increasingly important for any website related to government or education institutions, or anyone organization receiving government funding.

        I am sure I will think of other things, but this is what I have now. I will let you know what other issues I run into as I am working on my project.

        I think you can create a great calendaring product here, something really needed. You have all the base tools to create something that is not out there yet.

        Thanks!
        Suzanne

  27. That is good news. Any idea when it will be ready? I just started building a website that is due to be launched in October and I may be interered in using the new option.

    I would especially be interested in recurring events: the same event that re-occurs monthly, without having to create a seperate event for each month.

    I would like to make one calendar page with displating all events (e.g. https://thebox.cocgd.nl/agenda-meetings/) and then use the same data to generate more specific event lists on the other content pages (e.g. https://thebox.cocgd.nl/groepen/jongeren-groningen/).

    • We don’t have a schedule yet. We’re collecting feature requests here, so we can understand the scope of the project. Thanks for your explanation and examples. This helps a lot.

  28. Amir,

    Thank you for this opportunity.

    I can give you very detailed requirements and access to a test site which is currently sort of integrating toolset another plugin with toolset, very much helped by your excellent support team.

    At the moment I am unable to publish the url on a public forum

    thanks

  29. Amir,

    I created some Extensions for my development tools named PHPMaker, and one of the Extensions is to generate a basic Calendar with CRUD operations by using a Modal dialog window.

    Hopefully you could implement those CRUD features above including the ability to create an Event by using select from the begin of date until the end of date, drag-and-drop, etc.

    FYI, I am still using FullCalendar v3.x (not v4) from fullcalendar.io. If you could implement v4, that would be nice.

    Please have a look from the following link for live demo: http://demo15.ilovephpmaker.com/calendarscheduler.php

    – Username = admin
    – Password = master

    Thank you.

    • Great, thanks. We got a ton of feedback so it will take us a few days to check it out.

      • No problem.

        Just for your references, some advanced features that I created:
        1. Repeating event (Every Day, Every Week, Every Month, and Every Year),
        2. Multiple Days event,
        3. Quick action to create an Event by clicking a Date in Calendar or select multiple dates,
        4. Edit existing event (supports for all events or only the current event)
        5. Delete event by enabling the Delete option; supports single Day or multiple Days delete method,
        6. By default, the Hours wil bel started from 00:00:00 and will be ended on 23:59:59,
        7. If the Hours ends on 00:00:00, then the Event can be extended to next Date by dragging-and-dropping the event,
        8. Modal dialog cannot be closed from outside its area when End-Users are working on it,
        9. View modal dialog can be closed easily by clicking on outside of Modal area.
        10.

  31. Hi Amir,

    I need to build a project for a music school. What thay need is a complete management platform for students, teachers, courses, and rooms, … For now, Toolset can help me adequatly.
    But they need to have a calendar view of teachers booking classes in a specific rooms for specific students without being able to add 2 events in the same time/space slot in the calendar. I don’t any live example sorry.

    Thanks for your hard work

  32. I have a tourism site buile completely with TOOLSET. The events page is a favorite page for visitors…
    https://www.vabeach.com/virginia-beach-events/

    However some visitors would prefer a calendar view of these events so that they can navigate by month and by week.

    Hovering over a specific day and displaying a modal or tooltip with more detailed information for each even would be a useful option. (Although I suppose we could simply do that using BOOTSTRAP)

  33. Hi Amir

    Please don’t forget the timeline view.
    Thank you and wish you all success in this new Project.

  35. hi
    we would like to show the coming soon publications from woocommerce products. Specifically, we are making books and we would like to have a regular shop page and a calendar page of the titles coming out, people able to note that on their google calendar.

  36. Awesome!

    Since you’ve asked here is my use case:

    In my web app the user can generate a private event calendar, where for specific dates(unique, recurring, custom weekly(or monthly) pattern) he can define time blocks(hours, half hours, custom(minutes)) and assign data to each time block.

    Then events should be able to span through more than one time block if needed(based on project specs).

    For example:
    Open hours for doctor in his home office:

    Every Tuesday from 9:00AM to 12:30PM
    Every Friday from 1:30PM to 6:00PM

    First doc needs to define his time blocks per day:
    – He wants to split the day to 48 blocks so he can assign open/close to every 30min chunk of time(block) AND be able to assign a patient to every 30min block that has no patients assigned and is within the open hours time.

    Then when the doctor logs in into our app he can see his appointments for the week, and also the patients can log into the app and browse for doctors that are close and available today.

    This is an example, I can not give point you to another website that already has this functionality because this is not the point of the idea. We don’t want to copy a model but come up with something authentic. If I have a real event based project I do it WooCommerce Bookings extension anyway…

    Another use case is where I have farmers who have open hours on specific dates and accept visitors who want to buy directly from the farmer/garden.

    So again we need to define time blocks and assign true/false (open/close) for a single or multiple blocks at the same time.

    It is of great importance to have a local (user owned event calendar) and a global one that combines all events from all users.

    Use case: event agencies want to advertise events, each has their own calendar that they can contribute to, and there is a global calendar that takes all contributions from all agencies and unites the output so the user can see all events for the desired time window.

    So users need to be able to filter for available events based on a start/end date that he inputs. Here you can imagine how you book a flight.

    So events need to be able to have an owner(admin) and a user(client).

    One owner > many users.

    Use case: shared ride web app.
    I am traveling next Tuesday from 8:30 AM and have 3 free sits in my car which I can share.
    I create my event(trip) and specify that it can have three users maximum assigned to it.

    So when the user(one that is looking for a shared ride) finds his host driver he clicks on a free spot to reserve it! Fills in a form to say hi to the driver, uploads a photo and a telephone number, and if the driver approves his user, this gets recorded into the system and now he has only two free spots left for the ride.

    So events need to have availability slots also.

    Another use case for availability slots:
    If I start an event with only 200 tickets available, I need to be able to let the users know how much tickets(seats) I got left.

    So to sum it up an event should have:
    – 1 owner
    – many clients
    – availability slots
    – time blocks
    – custom fields

    The calendar should:
    – offer search functionality based on parameters and custom fields within each event.
    – show local or global events
    – offer quick filter options

    Owner should be able to:
    – define size of time blocks
    – set a boolean for each block(open/close) or many blocks at the same time.
    – define custom fields for events
    – browse his local event calendar
    – approve/decline requests from users to reserve an open slot

    Users should be able to:
    – search global calendar
    – search local calendars
    – reserve an empty slot(or slots) of a specific time block(or time blocks).

    No example websites, I hope that helps.

  37. Hi Amir, that are great plans. I love to hear and see all your plans for the future development of Toolset 🙂 A calendar view is definitely a big plus. Often I build sites for holiday houses where customers book thier vacation which is a booking period. There are a few different steps involved. The customers checks the website for available time periods and then fills out a booking form to request that time period. Then an email is sent to the customer as well as to the administrator. After that the administrator can check and confirm or dismiss the booking. For the calendar view there are some things which are a bit special: It should be possible to display multiple months, to create a calendar legend, to change the first day of the week, to hide the booking history on the front-end (IMPORTANT), the possibility to combine different calendars into one view (for multiple rooms/flats), to have a visible changeover on the day the booking ends/begins (IMPORTANT) because guests leave in the morning and the next guests come in the afternoon on the same day or import and export with other platforms. Most of the things can be seen in the WP Simple Booking Calendar (https://www.wpsimplebookingcalendar.com/) or on CalendarApp (https://calendarapp.de/en/daily-booking-schedule/). At the bottom of the page there you can see the result of what is needed. Thanks a lot in advance.

    • Thanks Daniel. Your description helps a lot.

      Our plan in this development is to create a way to display information on a calendar. We don’t have the capacity to create a fully featured booking system.
      ‘
      From your feedback and a lot of other feedback that we got, I’m not sure that the calendar display, by itself, will be very useful. If we only implement the calendar display without the rest of the booking system, will it have any value for you?

      • Thanks for your comment. And you are right. I´m not sure how far you can go with the calendar display. A fully fledged booking system definitely is too much to ask for. It´s a different beast. But I guess it will depend on what the calendar view is able to do 😉 I can build a lot of the needed booking functionality already with Types, Views and Forms. A calendar maybe could help to accomplish the task of a very simple booking calendar by showing the reservations on the calendar. Most booking systems have a lot of additional features I don´t really need. I really would love to build that simple booking system completely with Toolset. But let´s see where the journey takes us 🙂 Thank´s a lot for considering it and keeping this use case in mind.

  38. Great idea! I have a current need for a view like this. I have used views to display Events as custom post types so an additional ability to display them as an actual calendar grid would be awesome.

  39. Hi Amir,

    A calendar view is a nice addition.

    I have used https://time.ly/ and https://wordpress.org/plugins/the-events-calendar/

    Beyond the basics of showing an event CPT on a calendar, these are a few important advanced features to include:

    1. Advanced frequency options: eg. on the 3rd thursday of every third month.
    2. Clone an event: sometimes events do not repeat on a regular schedule, so making a clone is helpful. One only has to change the date or if the event moves from one venue to another.
    3. linked CPTs for venues, organizers that can be selected from a dropdown when creating the event.
    4. When an event runs for one, or more days, have the option to show them in the calendar view without covering the entire day(s). That is, if there are other events on the same day, show them as well. Perhaps full day and multiple day events can be shown with an All Day tag over their entry in the calendar.

    Visualizing display of calendars, I find some nice examples here:

    http://wordfish.tv/calendar-view-1
    http://wordfish.tv/calendar-view-2
    http://wordfish.tv/calendar-view-3

    Note: I created these links using capsulink.com. Just as I am about to send, I see that their site is down. That is probably temporary, so I will leave them and hope their servers are back online when you want to check the samples.

    I hope this helps.

    All the best,

    Anthony Tilke

    • Hi — we also use Time.ly for dozens of calendars, which we aggregate to a central calendar using Time.ly

      It can be tricky to represent complex date options with out using iCAL (Suppose your events recurs on the second and fourth Friday of every month except in June and December!)

      Time.ly makes use of wp_posts to store event content, but they also use an extra side table to store event dates, recurrence rules, exception rules, venue name and address info, latitude, longitude and other fields.

      I can easily query the Time.ly “events” content type, but would need to write extra code to access the above fields.

      If Toolset introduced iCAL-compatible calendar features (calendar display would have to provide an iCAL feed, we would probably consider it for some of our sites. It might be simpler for Toolset to support some of the existing calendars like Time.ly, etc with a help plugin for Views.

      A typical use case we see is when site owners want a custom view of events on their front page. Time.ly provides several widgets for “upcoming events” and several other list views, but often people want something different.

      Rod

  41. Similar to MS Projects ‘project planning’ and ‘multiple timelines’. Where tasks (posts) are entered like a Critical Path Schedule where tasks and its task duration can be subject-to other tasks timelines and completions. e.g. All tasks to build a house entered beginning of project w/ each task given an anticipated duration period. Each task also is given the option to be dependent on a previous tasks start or end, before can run. Thus the calender timeline fluctuates as ‘actual’ timelines are updated within each ‘post’. Such that calender is fluid. Views can then zoom in to specific areas of timeline/calender, or see full project, or see all projects at once (**).

    https://products.office.com/en-us/project/project-management

  42. We showcase event from around the world that are of interest for our industry. We need to be able to edit each event year after year to update with the info of the next edition. We need to display the logo, date, location description, website and registration link for exemple.

  45. I would expect you will give us the chance to drop our own defined fields in the diary. A way to view 7 days, as well as a month, would be useful.

  47. I’m excited to hear this, and there have been many good suggestions already submitted. I’m looking forward to being able to use post relationships. For a directory site, Events could be directly associated with Listings. Also, Venues/Locations could be stored as a custom post type.

    I’ve tried three or four different calendar plugins with Toolset sites — each has
    its pros and cons, and the cons that each has makes integrating them with Toolset somewhat difficult. I pick the calendar plugin based upon the client’s needs and which one will be least difficult to integrate. Having everything within Toolset will give me much more flexibility, to leverage post relationships and then also to use Views.

  48. https://505news.co.uk/events/ This is a simple list with colour categorisation and filters (couldn’t get the background colours on checkboxes when I built it a few years ago…). List view is by far the easiest to read in this case, but an easy conversion to a mobile display would be nice, and add to ical/outlook links desirable. Month headings in the list, and ‘view as map’ such as this would be good https://www.int505.org/events/

  49. This is really exciting, I have so many ideas for this add-on, I’ll try to explain:

    1. A booking calendar with the ability to sync it with Google Calendars, importing events as posts, and creating an event post creates an event on Google Calendar.

    2. A shift manager, where an administrator can create events for existing users that last for a specified shift period (4 hours, 8 hours, whatever is specified by the admin). Also templates for reusable shift events, so if someone is assigned to “Shift A” it has instructions specific to that shift which are different from “Shift B.” I think Toolset already has the rest of functionality I would need for this kind of project, such as Views and child content.

    There are probably more applications for the second functionality set, that’s just the one I have had clients requesting. Currently they use a plugin called Shifter Pro, which is a terrible plugin with no support. I’m excited to see what you guys come up with!!

  51. I’m so glad that you’re doing this! I’m going to link you to three examples which together represent my feedback for what would be the optimal calendar for Toolset. (Please view these on a computer)

    1. From a design point of view, I have found nothing better than this WordPress plugin, EventOn. Be sure to go through each of the different tabs in this demo for Daily View, Weekly View, etc. The elegant design sets it apart from everything else I’ve seen. And notice the way the information slides down when you click on a day.

    http://addons.myeventon.com/dailyview/

    2. With this Javascript scheduler, the drag drop feature is what’s important. In the month and week you can drag the event from day to day; in the daily view you can drag to resize the duration of the event.

    https://fullcalendar.io/#demos

    3. With this other Javascript calendar, you can click on an event to edit it. This would be amazing to be able to edit calendar events with Toolset forms in this way – without leaving the calendar.

    https://www.syncfusion.com/javascript-ui-controls/js-scheduler

  53. Recurring events are always a challenge to create. We would like to have this feature working well and providing multiple recurring options.

  55. Here are two calendar functionalities that are very useful.

    Event Espresso
    Calendar for event registration:
    Allows color coding of event categories
    https://www.comedyguys.com/defensive-driving-classes-texas/

    Stachethemes Event Calendar
    https://codecanyon.net/item/stachethemes-event-calendar-wordpress-events-calendar-plugin/16168229
    This calendar provides multiple view selections including a list view that is good for an organization or company that does not have a lot events and wants to display a full year of their events in a single view. (Seems to be a feature hard to find on calendars)
    Example: https://soobahkdo.com/calendars/

  56. Finally!

    I use event/calendar plugins on several of my regional sites. Here are some examples of how they work:

    EventOn Plugin: visit https://southfloridafamilylife for the main calendar and https://southfloridafamilylife.com/broward-and-miami-dade-county-family-events/ for the default search page

    All In One Calendar Plugin: visit http://www.friscocentral.com/ to see a widget on the homepage, and http://www.friscocentral.com/all-events-in-frisco-texas/ for the default search page

    Event Manager Plugin: visit http://birminghamparent.com/directory/events/ (Note: still working on this one)

    Main features should be search by date, date range, taxonomy, tags, location including zip range, customizable display in widgets, full calendar view, and the ability to view results in various formats including list view, popup, ajax, and single detail page.

    That should be enough to get you started… you asked! 😉

  57. -Recuring events
    -Popup(tooltip) on hover or click of event on calendar to see details.
    – Multiday events that SPAN the days graphically not the event re-shown on each day it spans for.

  58. Thank you. This is great news and none too soon!

    MUST HAVE
    – calendar month view
    – calendar week view
    – calendar day view
    – conditional logic and date/time comparisons
    – choose 24hr or 12hr time format
    – recurring events

    NICE TO HAVE
    – choose week start on Sunday or Monday
    – iCal and Google Calendar export

  59. Hi,
    I have two calendar requirements; one is for a church where we need to show What’sOn events and offer a click-through for more information. The other is for a Yoga class which needs to show upcoming classes, numbers and booking click-through.
    cheers, Roland

  60. The one thing I always end up needing for calendar functionality — and which is incredibly expensive with both of the popular calendar plugins — is the ability to import a calendar/ICS/XML feed from somewhere else and create events. Any calendar that doesn’t have this option is generally not something I’ll consider.

  62. Would LOVE to see this capability added! I handle several small, non-profit and/or local/government organizations that do not subscribe to easily embedded/viewable calendars that can be ‘shared’ – 🙂
    That said, I currently use a still plugging along and working, plug-in for wordpress to accomplish calendar entries and information/maps to facilitate sans online calendar maintained by customer- Here’s an example of the calendar view: https://townofsimla.com/upcoming-events/. Here’s the widget for all options, set to show only so many future events on the home page: https://townofsimla.com (widget title “Upcoming Dates”

  63. Fantastic news. I think the one thing I’d like to see integrated into the calendar is Google calendar synchronisation. Can’t wait to see what you come up with.

    Keep up the good work.

  64. Its really important to me that I am able to place multi-day engagements. I recently built a site for a fishing guide that would book whole weekends To a single client and it was important to be able to show that a single appointment stretched over multiple days. This os a common occurrence for hotels, guides, tours, cruises etc.

  65. Recurring events (Day of week. Day of Month. Day of Year Etc) / Multiple events on the same day /

    Should easily be able to sync with any logged in users Google Calendar (Do this before release as you know it’s going to be asked for over and over and over and over)

    / Views by the year, month, and week built in.

    Should have an option to pick up the styling of the theme and if set on default, have some type of clean default styling built in. An automatic pre-made default post form to add a ‘post’ with the recurring options already built in as well.

    That is my two cents right off the top. I’ve built my own calendar with Toolset and it works pretty well but I never made it as far as to have an actual monthly calendar looking view (just sorted it and put it into a list) and do not have any recurring events (my workaround for that is to just re-edit the date on a past post).

    I feel like it should also be able to be easily printed, like any other normal calendar.

    That’s my wish list for it. Love Toolset and rave about it and your support all over the internet. Keep up the awesome work. 🙂

  66. It is great to hear that there might soon be a practical way to create an events capability. I currently use Timely but it holds the custom fields in a separate table which I can’t access with Toolset so the functionality is very limited.

    Here are what I would ideally like:

    – Show events in a month, week or day view
    – Search for event and show on calendar
    – Show as a block (like say Google Calendar) whose size varies with the duration between start and end time
    – Click on event to go to single post page
    – Filter events by taxonomy item
    – The ability to show a schedule for a week (grid horizontal Monday to Sunday, vertical 0000 to 2359)

    I think there are also some CRED form needs:

    – A “time only” field (so that start and end time don’t need entry of a date)
    – The ability to say that an event recurs daily or weekly between two dates at a certain time (e.g. every Wednesday from 3pm to 5pm between 5th July and 30th September
    –

    Thanks

  67. I’m assuming that we’d be able to create a template for each event on the calendar grid (or other week, workweek, etc display options), so that covers most questions to do with what information to display, hover info, etc.

    I’ve been running an active event calendar for several years

    Here’s what I’m currently doing:
    – I have a custom post type for “Locations” and each event is typically a child of a post of the Locations post type. This removes the need to keep adding location information. It also allows me to display a location and display all of the upcoming events for that location.
    – Taxonomies
    – Event Category
    – Event Tag
    – Custom Fields
    – Start Date – Date field
    – Start Time – Single line field
    – End Date – Date field
    – End Time – Single line field
    – Cost/Cover – Single line field
    – Event URL – URL field
    – On my new version of this I’m using conditional logic to hide time and date fields until it’s logical to display them.
    – Website members can submit events via a Toolset Form that must be approved by an admin before they appear on the website.

    What I already have and what’s possible, covers several of the requests submitted.

    Simple event registration is also already possible and something I’ve implemented on a website for industrial training. Basically a logged in member creates a “ticket” that is a child post of the event post and includes all the member info.

    For display options:
    – Calendar grid View, Week View, Today List View, Tomorrow List View
    – option to have multiple day events visually span multiple days or appear as single day events (multi day view example here: https://calendarize.it/wordpress-calendar-plugin/different-calendar-views/)
    – Events that span multiple days should be shown above other events. The order for the multiple day events should be descending by the number of future days. The reason for this is apparent when you have one or more single day events above an event that spans multiple days. It really makes the calendar look like garbage.

    General Requests:
    – Recurring events. Please please please, right now I’m using a post duplication plugin, and have to edit a dupe for each occurance. The way that Events Manager (https://en-ca.wordpress.org/plugins/events-manager/) deals with recurring events with creating a separate event for each occurance worked well for me when I used it in the past. I thought about looking into a repeating fields group, but haven’t yet.
    – Ability to filter to display events occurring TODAY or TOMORROW. At first this looks like it would be easy, but once you introduce multiple day events, it gets a little sticky. I’m currently checking to see if the Start Date is greater than or equal to TODAY() OR End Date is greater than or equal to TODAY().
    – When editing a date field, the field shouldn’t reset to the current date. If I’m editing a date field that’s 14 months in the future and want to change the date by one day, it resets the field to the current date, then I have to bump it ahead by 14 months to what it was in the first place, then choose the date.

    Links:
    My calendar displaying current events: https://www.kamloopscity.com/events/ (I’ve in the process of replacing this entire site so I haven’t been updating this a lot)
    Location with upcoming events: https://www.kamloopscity.com/location/pogue-mahone-irish-alehouse/
    Events Manager: https://en-ca.wordpress.org/plugins/events-manager/
    Example of multi-day event display: https://calendarize.it/wordpress-calendar-plugin/different-calendar-views/

  69. YEs a calendar would be a very welcome addition. It is one of the few functionalities i am really missing in toolset.

    Two features that would be welcome are:

    Making recurring dates(weekly, monthly etc.)
    Filtering by child field. I made a supportthread about what i mean:
    https://toolset.com/forums/topic/filtering-by-child-field/

    Basicaly, to be able to show parent post types(ex: training) filtered by repeating custom field(ex: trainingdate)

    Great to hear that we might get calandar functionalities!

    Keep up the great work

  71. I am very excited for this! I currently use The Events Calendar, Events Calendar Pro, Events Calendar Community Events and Events Calendar Shortcodes Pro. Way too many plugins to accomplish things that would be so easy in Toolset, I think.

    The ability for non registered website visitors to add events to the calendar as drafts, including the ability to add photos, would be wonderful. The ability to set up recurring events–weekly, monthly, or via a custom date range would be very helpful, too. Not essential, but really helpful. Here are a couple of instances from one website of how I would like to use it.

    https://alabamabirdingtrails.com/events/

    https://alabamabirdingtrails.com/events/community/add

  72. I currently use the events calendar (TEC) to show events by day, week or calendar, like shown on my website https://99dances.com/events/month/

    I believe that I will still continue to use TEC for some time because I import events from google calendar, facebook, meetup and eventbrite and that would be be difficult with toolset.

    However, I would use the toolset calendar with TEC if it would allow me to create better search filter then currently available on TEC.

    For me a basic calendar is enough what I like to see is advanced filtering possibilities like keywords, custom date/hour range filter, google maps address or custom fields without having to be a programmer.

  73. I have built several calendars using Toolset over the years but it is a very manual process using heaps of CSS inputs. Having an events calendar that is easy to code and style is the key for us.

  74. Hi Amir, I do a lot of events management and calendar solutions on clients’ websites. I’ve built a basic solution with Toolset and more elaborate solutions on Events Manager, sometimes with additional custom Toolset Views.

    I have a new need to build a volunteer scheduling solution for nonprofits. If this might be an interesting use case for Toolset to consider in building more calendar related capabilities I’d be happy to share some requirements and user stories.

    The basics are volunteer coordinator can create one or a recurring set of events with a number of volunteers need for each of several slots (roles) where different volunteers are qualified to fill different slots so they can’t be allowed to choose slots they are not qualified for. The ability to signup for a specific slot type is ideally just driven by the email address they enter, not by logging in with a password and using real role based access control. If the event recurs, ideally they can sign up for one, some or all instances including “check all” then uncheck just a few when they might be away on holiday, etc. In a perfect world, we could source the email addresses and qualified roles for the volunteers from an integration via a REST API with the constituent management system either in real-time or by a sync mechanism but that doesn’t have to part of this solution. Volunteers should be able to see when they are scheduled in the future and when they’ve been scheduled in the last 12 months.

    A related need is the ability to automate emails to fill slots where the emails go to the volunteers who are qualified and are not yet signed up — say 48 hours before the event, if not all slots are filled, an email goes to the right group of people asking if they can help.

    And 24 hours before the event, those who are signed up should get a reminder that they are signed up and what time they are expected.

    I don’t expect Toolset to build this exact solution (I would be delighted if you did though! ) but if you think about what would allow me to build it while you are building your calendar / events capabilities, you’d end up with something more able to help partners like me meet these kinds of needs.

  75. For my company I needed a plugin that would allow me to have an editorial calendar that wouldn’t just deal with posts on the website, but gave us the ability to plan daily what activity we should perform on social media. I just wanted a simple CALENDAR VIEW where I could double click on a given day and write some kind of “to dol list”. I searched everywhere but couldn’t find anything like that. The thought that I COULD have that available in Toolset is beyond cool. Please, it is a MUCH NEEDED feature!!!

  76. I did not read every post above so I am not sure I’ll be adding anything new. However, since I am already using Toolset on my set for CPT’s I would prefer to not use an event plugin, and use Toolset instead. My problem is that I need to be able to create more complex recurring event patterns than I know how to do with Toolset alone.

    I don’t actually need or want a ‘calendar’, I simply want a loop of events that I can style the archive for (as a grid, unordered list, etc) – this we already have ability to do with Toolset. But when it comes setting the reoccurrence pattern and displaying these dates on the front end is where I get stuck. Also, the event plugins I’ve tried do more than just create a CPT with custom fields, they typically include templates for displaying them that I dont know how to override. I’d prefer they not include templates at all or have templates that can easily be overridden by Toolset, my theme or Elementor.

    Reoccurrence pattern examples:
    – recur daily, weekly, monthly, yearly
    – recur every X day, week, month, year
    – recur on same day of the month
    – recur 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th or last ____ of the month
    – recur until ___
    – exclude dates

    If the event runs “July 1st through July 4th” I’d want to display this as “July 1st – 4th, 2019” or something similar instead of “July 1st, 2019 – July 4th, 2019”. So a concatenated display date.

    If it recurs once per month I’d want to display only the single next occurrence as “September 1st, repeats monthly” or something similar, and not display all future instances of this event.

    I would want to show only future events but have option for users to search the site and find past events.

    So I am trying to find an events plugin that gives me these features but who’s fields can be managed by Toolset, and who’s template I can override with Toolset, Elementor or my theme.

    I hope this is helpful.