One thing we get asked a lot is, ‘how can I add an events calendar to our wordpress site’. There is no out of the box solution on wordpress.com, which is a shame and I personally think they are missing an opportunity here. Due to ‘security concerns’ wordpress don’t allow iframes in their sites. iFrames are Googles’ tool of choice for embedding content, you can’t simply use the embedcode provided by Google Calendar so you can’t use the Google calendar solution to add events or room hire dates to your site.
That said, recently wordpress have added the ability add Google maps which also uses iframes, wordpress adapts the code when you have pasted it in to the post or page (I have tried with calendar and it doesn’t work) so hopefully Google Calendar will be supported soon, until it is supported, here is a way you can work around the problem, although it is a little less elegant.
Step 1, go to your wordpress Dashboard select Posts and then Categories, in here create a new category called Events
Step 2, add some of your events to the site as posts and make sure you add them to the new events category, I would suggest that you title all your events in a standard format like [events name] [event date] that way people can see it is : Pensioners Tea Dance Friday 8 October 2010
Step 3, you need to add a link to the events category to your side bar, by default if you are using the category widget, your new Events category will show up in here, but you want to make it even easier to find than that, so from the Dashboard, go to Appearance and Widgets. Select the Text widget, left click & hold then drag it to the side bar on the right of the page and release to place it. The widget will automatically open up so you can configure it. Give it a snappy title like, Our Events, in the title.
Next you will need to add a line of code to make a link to your events category.
Step 4, don’t panic, adding code isn’t difficult or scary as we will see, take a deep breath and move on to step 5
Step 5, in the large box under where you have added the title you need to type or Copy & Paste the following line,
<a href=”http://yoursite.wordpress.com/categories/events/”>Events Listings</a>
You will need to change yoursite to the actual name of your site from the URL in the address bar.
You can change Events Listings to whatever text you want
Click save and your new link to your events listings posts should be on the sidebar and working.
Customisation
Once you have got the line of code in and working you can add text around it so the link appears in the middle of a sentence like this. Just type as normal in front of the < and as normal after >
Mike Rawlins
Away from Talk About Local I take photos, fly my quadcopter and walk my two Beagles.
If I'm not doing any of the above then you'll find me volunteering at my local RNLI station as a press officer.
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Alan Thompson says
13th January 2011 at 10:33 amthere is a wordpress plugin called gigpress that might be useful for this sort of thing.
It’s aimed at bands/musicians to enable them to manage info about gigs but could possibly be adapted to be useful for listing events in a broader sense.
http://gigpress.com/