Saturday, October 26, 2019

Add a Calendar to Your Company Intranet With a WordPress Plugin

Add a Calendar to Your Company Intranet With a WordPress Plugin
Final product image
What You'll Be Creating

WordPress is a great system for building a company intranet.

You may already be using WordPress for your public website, but it also handles intranets really well. From sharing news, to social interaction and collaboration, WordPress lets you add functionality to your company intranet that helps you communicate more effectively as a team and share resources.

One resource you might want to share via your intranet is a calendar. You can use this not only to book meetings, but also to provide details of events that will affect the whole team and discuss an event in advance.

In this tutorial, I'll show you how you can use the EventON plugin to add a calendar to your company intranet. We'll create a calendar system that is more than just a link to a Google Calendar (although it can link to that): it'll be a hub for sharing company events and planning for them too.

Why Add a Calendar Plugin to Your Company Intranet?

A company intranet is a great place to share information and resources between team members. It's where they can find out about company news, look up information about products and services, check data about products and orders, and more.

What you add to your intranet will depend on your business and the needs of your team. But one invaluable resource in any intranet will always be an events calendar.

You could go down the simple route and simply embed a Google Calendar in one of the pages of your intranet. But using a dedicated events plugin like EventON lets you add much more detail to each event.

You can include images, file uploads, details of the organizer and the venue, and more. You can set some events as featured so they're clearly more important, and you can enable comments so that team members can discuss details of the event right inside your intranet.

The EventON plugin also lets team members link events to their own calendar on Google or elsewhere, so they can save details of events for themselves.

Let's take a look at how it works.

Installing and Configuring the EventON PLugin

Firstly, you'll need to purchase and download the EventON plugin from CodeCanyon.

Once you've done that, you'l need to configure your event settings. Go to myEventON > Settings.

EventON settings

There are a number of configurable settings. Some of the most useful are below:

  • General Calendar Settings: Enable or disable specific settings, including advanced settings. If you leave all this at the default settings, you won't go far wrong.
  • Google Maps API: add a Google Maps API key to display Google Maps on event pages. This will help team members find events which are out of the office.
  • Time Settings: Configure the way time and date are displayed in the calendar.
  • Appearance: Configure the colors and styles used in your calendar.
  • EventCard: configure the way individual events are displayed.

Creating an Event

The next step is to create your first event.

Go to Events > Add Event to see the event editing page.

event editing page

The editing screen includes a main editing pane where you can add information about the event, plus sections for date, time, location and more. You can also add event organizers. 

Event organizers and locations are saved separately so that you can reuse them for future events.

Work through the screen, providing all the information about your event until it contains everything you need.

On the right hand side of the screen there are metaboxes where you can provide more information about your event. These include:

  • event categories
  • event color
  • event image

Repeating and Duplicate Events

As well as creating events, you can also duplicate them to create new ones. This is useful if you have a second event which is very similar to an earlier event, such as team meetings.

If the event will be exactly the same every time it runs, you don't need to duplicate it: instead you can set it as a repeating event.

a repeating event

You can find this below the event time and date settings and above the location settings. Set the event to repeat weekly, monthly or at another interval and multiple events will automatically be created for you.

Displaying Events

Each event will have its own event page and will be added to the main Events page which the plugin will automatically create when you activate it. Make sure you add this to your navigation menu.

This page will display a list of upcoming events by month.

events page showing upcoming events by month

Click on any event and you'll be able to see full details. What is displayed will depend on the way you configured the event when setting it up.

individual event details page

You can change the settings for your events so that when they are clicked on, an event page is opened instead. This is useful if an event has a lot of information.

To do this, go to the event editing page and scroll down to the User Interaction for event click section.

The option on the right will open a new page if a user clicks on the event.

event click settings

Then when a user clicks on the event in the main Events page, they will be taken to a full page for that event with more information.

single event page

Adding Extra Features

The EventON plugin is designed to be a simple, minimal plugin that will display information about events with little effort or fuss.

But if you need extra functionality, you can install addons for the plugin. These include:

  • RSVPs: invite team members to events and they can RSVP.
  • RSS feed: make a list of event available to RSS readers.
  • Events map: put all the events in a month on one Google map.
  • Full cal: display events in a grid style calendar instead of a list.
  • Weekly view: display events in a weekly view.

These are some of the add-ons that might be useful for a company intranet: it isn't an exhaustive list.

Summary

A company intranet is a great resource for sharing information between company staff and team members. By adding an events calendar, you can plan events and meetings, share resources relating to them, and discuss the agenda ahead of time.

The EventOn plugin will help you add a clean events calendar to your intranet with multiple options for customization and addons if you need them.


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