Integrating Events into Wordpress - wordpress

I'm in the process of developing a website for a not-for-profit organization, and I thought that Wordpress would be a great tool to use as the base CMS for the site. Building the site into Wordpress has not been a problem, but I have been having a difficult time finding a plugin to use to help them organize and advertise upcoming Events. Currently, they use Google Calendar, but are trying to move to something that integrates more cleanly into their site.
Essentially, I need a Wordpress events/calendar plugin with these features:
+ Add reoccurring events with start and end time
+ Each event should have its own page (reoccurring events should be shown as a single page)
+ Display all events in a mini-calendar and a full calendar/list view
It would also be nice to have these features:
* Ability to categorize/tag events
* Ability to add a picture to go with the event
I'm indifferent on these features:
- Being able to RSVP
- Paying for events
- Import/Export calendars
There are many Events/Calendar plugins out there for Wordpress, but I can't seem to decide which one is worth me spending time to use for this website. Any suggestions?

You can create a Category called "Events" and design a layout for that cat. in particular.
then post new events to that category.
also, have you looked in to this plugins?
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-events/screenshots/
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/events-manager/screenshots/
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/events-manager-extended/screenshots/

This may be a bit late for you, but others may find it helpful. This plug-in fits the bill for the features you were after:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/event-organiser/
(Full disclosure: I wrote this plug-in).

Related

WP Full Calendar not displaying Modern Tribe Events

Quite new and a beginner with most of this but I can usually problem solve and follow along well enough to fix most minor errors although I'm having some trouble with this one. I'm building a WordPress site and using The Events Manager by Modern Tribe for a calendar because it has most of the functions I need. However, without paying for an upgrade there's no way to sort by category or display on another page other than the default hat it puts it on. I was hoping to use WP Full Calendar to do both of these since it seems simple and really I just want the prior for fetching/creating the events not the calendar. Problem is WP Full Calendar isn't displaying any of the events although it is able to fetch the categories for them for use in sorting in the settings and seems to function properly aside form no events actually appear.
Wondering if anyone else has tried this and had similar hangups and it's something inherently about those two plugins that don't agree or if it's just me.
I've been doing this very thing and the only option I found was to actually modify the plugin itself. By default, fullcalendar expects dates from ACF or integration with Events Manager. The fundamental problem is that Modern Tribe Events has it's own API for getting date information (like tribe_get_start_date() for the start date) and fullcalendar does not support it out of the box.

Google ranking - Modal views - google analytics events

I modified a site recently :
- I added many google analytics events, to better understand user behaviour.
- I added also two buttons on almost all the pages of the site. Those buttons show modal-views (I am using bootstrap) with questions about user opinion. This modals views are on almost all pages of the site.
After this modification the ranking of the site decreased on google search from the second place to the seconde page :(
Is it the events-collected or the model-views added ?
If the model-views are the reason, then how to better do similar surveys ?
Did you have please similar experience, or explanation to this ?
It is unlikely due to the recent modifications you made on your pages. Those are neutral. May be Google or users found "better" or more valuable pages than yours. Maybe Google has changed the criteria it uses to rank pages in your niche.

Scheduling and publishing replacement pages in a CMS

Does anyone have any ideas or know of any plugins to allow pages to be scheduled and replaced.
preamble:
currently evaluating different content management systems for a new project, we create new pages and also updating existing pages for example as part of a 'maintenance release'.
We will be using either PHP (preferably) or C#
Problem:
We would like our users to be write and save a new revision of an existing page with a go-live date and time in the future, at this date and time we would like the page to be live replacing the existing page, but all links to the page, url etc to be the same.
Currently:
We have two separate installs and schedule updates to pages using a cron job and a PHP script running some mysql queries - this has failed us at critical times in the past when it has failed to run.
finally:
We could probably write this ourselves, either in our own CMS or as a plugin to an existing CMS - simply:
SELECT latest_revision from posts_pages_table
WHERE publishable='yes'
AND max(revision_date);
but does anyone have any experience of this with an existing CMS or from a technical point of view foresee any problems?
How for example in a wordpress backend will a user be sure they are updating the latest version of a page if it hasn't gone 'live' yet.
We have looked at all existing CMSs and searched google but scheduling updates to pages seems to be an uncommon occurrence so relying on some guidance from the trusty SO crowd.
thanks
If you are fine with PHP, you can use SilverStripe. To achieve what you are asking you'd use the CMS Workflow module.
SilverStripe CMS comes with two stages built-in: live and draft. You can keep reworking the draft version, which remain private until you are ready to publish. In the normal scenario you would just push to live.
With the CMS Workflow installed, you can additionally choose the date when the modification should go live ("embargo"). This stores your draft version for "later", and only pushes to live at the date you've chosen (this plugs in via the cron job).
There is also an "expiry" you can set on the page, at which point the page will be unpublished and will no longer be available publicly.
Embargo, expiry and publishing operations do not affect the URL nor ID of the page, so all the relations stay intact while you are reworking the page via the CMS.
References:
PDF manual, see page 16 for description of the embargo
Module page with a short description
Source
In Joomla, there is a way to do this out of the box without touching any code. Here's how I would do it -
Create a category for the page that will be getting replaced
Create a menu item pointing to that category. Set it to display 1 item only, ordered by newest date
Create a template override so that the category item displays like an article detail page
Create new articles with a start publish date that determines when it starts displaying
Basically, you'd be displaying a category but it would look like an article. It would always pull the newest article that has reached it's start publish date. It would be easy to keep track of because you would have copies of every version you post, each update you would simply make a copy of the last one to edit.
You could probably write something custom to accomplish the same thing, but why spend the time and effort when it can be done easily with a template override?

Issue Tracking Widget Suggestion

Can you suggest a very very simple issue tracking widget. UserVoice, is a little too involved for us with their forums and what not. What we want is something that just allows people to send us an issue or note and grabs a URL.
If by widget you mean something that you can embed on your page that will allow visitors to leave feedback/issues, there are javascript plugins, like feedback_me that will allow posting feedback to a backend provided by you.
If your are not comfortable with supplying a backend of your own, there are of course countless products that will do basic stuff for you and more. This is list by no means complete, but it's a start:
Usersnap
Trackduck
Marker
Userback
Bugmuncher
Doorbell
Hava a look at userrules.com
It allows you to integrate to your internal Issue Tracking system (JIRA, BugZilla, Redmine, Basecamp etc.). Any feedback from your customers come, you can directly export it to ur external system. And it will keep track of its progress for you.
Liked, what they have done with their UI, plus you can add your own customizable fields to ask some specific info from your customers in the feedback widget.
Getsatisfaction? BitBucket? Github? Google Code? All have issue trackers and, except for that last one, allow you to keep your code private, but your issues public.

How to integrate shopping cart system for flash application

I've built a simple flash application that takes a user's photo/image, offers various effects and filters to play with. In the end, the application can write-out the resulting image to a PDF print file (to be purchased and sent to a printer).
Currently I'm using PHP to template the web pages, with the Flash app embedded in the body of one of the pages.
I now need to integrate a shopping cart and check-out system, the idea being that the user can play with images, add various images to a shopping cart, at some point choose print sizes for each image, check-out and purchase etc. My app would attached the necessary print files, and email/submit the order to the printer.
In researching the various cart systems out there like Zen-cart, Magento, osCommerce, etc.. these all seem to be full featured CMS systems, full websites, that you deploy, customize and skin, add products to etc... a "canned store". But in my case, I'm adding/creating the product at run-time. It's not a traditional store where you browse and select items.
At first glance its not clear to me how I would use one of these systems, how to integrate with my Flash app.... it seems I only want to make use of the shopping cart, customer database portion, payment transaction features.
Is it possible to use one of these, using only the checkout and order management through a API? called from my Flash app? or processed via back-end PHP? Any suggestions, pointers?
I'm looking for some guidance, someone to point me in the right direction. I'm a noob to eCommerce.
Thank you!
I would just use PayPal Website Payments Standard, and have "Buy Now" buttons, or an "Add to Cart" button, which just adds the cost of each image to an array as your customers create the images. Then just set the appropriate PayPal Standard HTML variables and submit a form to PayPal. Then your customer would pay for the things on PayPal.
I'm building an eCommerce system with Flex and Rails right now (using Spree), and I can tell you it's a pretty decent undertaking. If you don't need to calculate shipping costs or taxes based on where the person lives, and you don't need to be able to have thousands of products, I'd just skip the whole eCommerce thing and use PayPal (it's free). That's what PeepCode does for example (they're a site I use to buy tutorial videos for Rails and such), you just say "add to cart", and it takes me to PayPal and I do my thing. Way easier, way less overhead. It sounds like you could do that.
If you really want to use a full featured eCommerce system, you can definitely connect to them through HTTP requests to get/post data, but that will be a long-term undertaking.
Hope that helps,
Lance

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