As well as the improvements to the website editor I blogged about recently, we’re also working on some major developments to the online events calendar/listing system.

You’re hopefully familiar with the College’s main events listing which is promoted on the College homepage but you may not realise you can have your own local events listing within your site.  Currently, this can enable you to have

• A chronological listing of forthcoming events
• An RSS feed of your events to enable people to keep track of what’s coming up
• The ability to “pull” events featured in the main College calendar into your own – and similarly to have your events “pushed” into the top level  listing

But we’d like the system to do a lot more!  We’ve already improved the look of the front page listing, and we are now focusing on some more significant improvements, including:

• A new design for individual event listings (see screen grab below)
• An calendar view of your listing so users can find out what events are taking place on a particular date
• Integration with PWPs so you can better highlight College academics speaking at events and seminars
• Better integration of social media to enable users to bookmark and share events of interest
• The ability for users to add an event of interest into their own calendar
• Icons to highlight when an event is full, cancelled or has a waiting list
• Integration of the image cropping tool to enable you to optimise photographs to promote your events, and a default event image if you are unable to supply an image for every event
• Functionality to allow you to use the system as an event archive, enabling you to add agendas, papers, presentation slides, links to videos and photo slideshows in the build up to and after your events
• A way to have events in your listing link straight to a separate conference website
• The option of combining multiple event listings into a single overall list (e.g. facilitating a department to have several listings for each research group and one overall events listing)
• A way to create a simple automatic sign up form for registering attendees
• Several options for displaying your events listing so you can highlight your forthcoming events on your homepage or within other pages

If you are currently using the events system on your site, we hope to introduce many of these improvements within the next couple of weeks.  We’ll contact you separately to brief you on any adjustments to the event creation process and editing events.

If you are interested in adding an events feed to your own site, contact the Service Desk so we can help you set that up.

Event article design