There are those who have designed their own CSS, but none of that work is available to new users. It would be great to get those of you who know CSS to design a new look for the calendar. We could publish the variant style-sheets, by way of example, and to inspire newcomers.

We could even have a competition!

Any takers? (Replies to the mailing list of course.)

I found Event Calendar in order to fill a need. I took over the North Branch Area Hockey Association website, quickly converted it to WordPress and started looking for things to enhance the site. One of the things that I wanted was a way to provide an event calendar so the members of the association could better track and promote their event activities. I can’t recall if I kicked the tires of other calendaring/event plugins, but I can say that I didn’t look any further after finding Event Calendar. It did the trick.

Ok, that’s not entirely true. I had designs on unloading the management of the NBAHA website on its members. I wanted it easier for anyone to post an event — so I worked on getting jscalendar integrated with the Event Calendar plugin. A popup calendar to select the date and time seemed like the perfect solution. After some mucking around on my part and some deft coding from Alex to fine tune the process, Event Calendar took another step along its journey as a widely used and strongly supported plugin.

Later, based on need, I had a hand in creating the WordPress widget and K2 Side Bar Module for Event Calendar.

I’ve deployed Event Calendar on another site, Stearns County, Minnesota. I’ve been tremendously satisfied with my Event Calendar endeavors — usage of the plugin, contributing code (Alex — thanks by the way, I’ve enjoyed interacting with you while learning a great deal along the way) and talking with other enthusiastic Event Calendar supporters over the years. It’s been great — I’m looking forward to what’s next.

Frequently groups have no one with knowledge of html, and if there is anyone they become bound to the web site with chains.  Event Calendar and WordPress allow simple easy rotation of service to anyone able to use a browser.  Without EC, I don’t know how I would do it.  EC and WordPress have provided an avenue of service and support to a lot of suffering people.  I’m very grateful it exists.

The key features to EC3 are its simplicity, it is post oriented, and all of this makes it seemless on the website but with loads of extensability.  Currently I am posting all of our church programs and events through the calendar.  I am using the PostLists plugin to add lists of events to the bottom of our program pages (still in development).  In the future all of our Sunday sermons will be podcasted with the podcasting plugin but show up in the event calendar on the dates that it was preached.  Want to catch the sermon you missed from last week?  All you would have to do is click back on the date you missed and find the sermon in the post along with notes and powerpoint etc.!

All of this is compounded with some awesome people coming on board making this one of the most useful plugins for WordPress in my opinion!

More importantly, though, I think the mailing list and support I got is what made it worthwhile  — I remember one instance, back in 2006, when I had a heck of a problem with a database migration and kept getting all sorts of errors … I think it had to do with PHP versions (or something) but I was really new at it and after going back and forth about it on the mailing list (see archive), Darrel took time to work me through the problem one-on-one in real-time troubleshooting it over instant messenger (see conclusion).

I couldn’t have done it without the help I got here.  So, I would just say that yes, the plugin is great but it’s the people that make it rock and roll.

-Damon

I didn’t write Event Calendar from scratch. I started with a plug-in written by someone called “Kitten”, but I quickly got enthusiastic and wrote the AJAX calendar widget, and the iCal feed.

Back in those WordPress 1.2 days, plug-in publicity started and ended with adding a link to your plug-in to the Wiki page. Pretty soon I had hundreds and hundreds of people commenting on my blog, reporting bug, requesting features and asking for support. I was overwhelmed. I started the mailing list to help manage it all. That helped a lot – many people were discouraged by the small effort required to join the list, and just solved their problems on their own (or gave up and looked elsewhere…) Also, the mailing list created a sort of community feeling, where more knowledgeable subscribers would help out newcomers with the simpler questions.

When I upgraded it to WordPress 2, the amount of support queries exploded again, and I just couldn’t cope. Rather than rush around answering the same questions dozens of times, I put lots of effort into documentation and ease-of-use. I was fanatical about resisting feature creep – I wanted a plug-in that most users could just install and use, without having to worry about lots of complicated installation. Darrell Schulte helped enormously, by contributing the WordPress Widget code.

In the last year I’ve been really busy, and hundreds of Event Calendar e-mail just piled up, unread. I was daunted by just the prospect of opening the mailing list folder. But then my wife forced me to upgrade The Raven, and I found to my delight that the mailing list crew had managed to keep Event Calendar working, without needing my constant presence.

Purely by chance just a week later, Rick Boatright from the list sent me an e-mail suggesting that he and some others take over support – they didn’t want to see the plug-in die… Well I didn’t want to see it die either. So now, I’m doing everything I can to build a team of people who can support the plug-in, without it needing my constant attention.