January 2009 Archives

I’ll admit it: I am a Drupal newbie. We chose it for our CMS last year, but we haven’t really been using it as a CMS as much as a place to dump and view our internal key indicator reports.  But finally! Ah, yes… we finally have a feature request that is actual content management - an event calendar.

Imagine my surprise when I go looking for an event calendar module and find nothing. How could such a huge CMS not have a simple event calendar? A big part of this misunderstanding was that I didn’t understand Drupal - at all. I still don’t really, but figuring this feature out has helped a lot.

One thing to realize is that Drupal is a content management system. So (eventually) it would make sense to create event content and display that content in a specific way. I surprisingly couldn’t find much documentation on this, so below are the steps I took to get my event calendar up and running. They’re kind of abbreviated, so just ask if you need any clarification. Keep in mind this was a learning experience, so if you have any tips for me, I would like those as well. ;)

1. ## Install Modules
   • View
   • Date
   • CCK
   • Calendar
   • Don’t forget to give yourself permissions to administer these modules and enable them!
2. ## Create Calendar Event Content Type
   1. Name: Event
   2. Type: event
   3. Title Field Label: Event
   4. Body Field Label: Details
   5. Do not promote to front page.
   6. Save
   7. Go to Manage Fields for Event in the content type list
   8. Add a field called Date of type fieldeventdate with a textfield/popup calendar+repeat selector. Configure it to be required and blank by default, have a reasonable format, and to hide the repeat options by default.
   9. Add a field called Location of type field_event_location that is a single-row text field. Configure it to be 100 chars long and required.
3. ## Set up A Calendar View
   1. Go to Administer > Views
   2. Enable the default calendar view and clone it.
      • View Name: a_calendar
      • View Description: Calendar
   3. Change the title to “Whatever you want Calendar”
   4. Change Arguments > Date: Date (Node: Updated date) to Content: Date (field_event_date value) Scroll down a bit to see the checkboxes (under Date fields)
   5. Add a sort criterion for Content: Date (field_event_date value)
   6. Add a filter for Node: Type is one of Event
   7. Click the Calendar page side-tab and change the path to “a_calendar”
   8. Click the Calendar block side-tab and change the block settings admin to “A Calendar”
   9. Save the view.
   10. Navigate to ?q=a_calendar to make sure it is working.
4. ## Set up Roles
   1. Add a new role called Calendar_User and add the following permissions:
      • Edit/view field_event_*
      • (Create | delete own | edit own) event content
   2. Give this role to whoever you want to create event entries. (Let’s call them eventries for fun)
5. ## Add a link somewhere and enjoy!