For professionals that use WordPress for their business, adding an event calendar could prove to be a most usefulproductivity tool. Display timely information to customers or website visitors to promote your events with a calendar WordPress plugin. This article features the capabilities of the plugin Calendar developed and supported by Kieran O’Shea which features a monthly view of events, mouse-over details for the events, multi-author capabilities, recurring events, sidebar functionality, modifiable CSS, and more.
Installation and Set-up
Search for Calendar by Kieran O’Shea in the WordPress Plugins dashboard. Install and activate according to the installation directions in the WordPress details window. A Calendar tab will be added to the admin panel below the Settings tab to the left sidebar. From there you can configure the settings for Calendar.
Calendar Options
Choose your calendar display options here. Select the lowest user group that can manage events, toggle if you want to display author names on events they create, toggle if you want a jump-box to easily change the month and year when adding events, toggle for the day’s events and upcoming events (can decide how many days in the future to display), enable event categories and configure the stylesheet if you wish to make changes to match a particular theme.
Manage Categories
Users can create custom categories in the Manage Categories set up area. Add a name and color (in Hex format) for ease of visibility by event types (for example: one day, weekly events, monthly events, all day events, etc.).
Manage Events
Manage Events includes all the detail for one time and recurring events. Add an event title, event description, a category, a URL associated with the event if needed, a start and end date, the time, and recurring detail if needed.
Add to blog
Calendar offers a number of options to add event information to your blog. Short code can be added to create a calendar page or to add a day’s events to a post. Users can also add widgets to the WordPress blog sidebars to displace recent events. You have the ability to filter by categories to display what you want which is helpful to highlight what is relevant by topic area.
After installation and editing the setup options, add a couple test categories and test events to see how the calendar looks on your site. Make sure things are working the way you want before you add a year’s worth of events.
A calendar plugin is useful for any number of niche blogs and businesses. It is a great marketing tool to advertise upcoming webinars, online chats, product or service announcements and trade shows. On your custom calendar page, in addition to the shortcode for the calendar, it is a good area to add a contact form or a way for visitors to your site to contact you and inquire after more information. You can also add post event information to show visitors what they could be missing out on. Don’t forget to take advantage of the URL field for each event to draw visitors to a relevant article or to your contact form as well.
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