Using Drupal, 2nd Edition

Chapter 6. Event Management

Managing online calendars and event registration can present a huge challenge. Without a dynamic system, the task is nearly impossible. Generating the HTML required to display a calendar and all the various presentation options (day, week, month views, and so on) is unreasonable; and worse, because the events are time-sensitive, remembering to update “next” or “upcoming” event lists can be onerous. Nothing looks worse than having last week’s meeting listed first on your Upcoming Events page.

Even with dynamic systems, you tend to be constrained to certain parameters with fixed options. However, by taking advantage of the flexibility of Drupal and building on the powerful base of Views, you can accommodate nearly any variation on event listings for your site.

This chapter introduces the following modules:

Date

Provides a field for entering date and time information, as well as libraries to handle operations like date math and time zone conversion

Calendar

A view style for displaying a list of site content in a rich calendar display

Flag

A flexible utility module that enables administrators to add on/off toggle switches to entities such as nodes and comments

Figure 6-1. The completed Aurora Book Club site

To follow along with the hands-on example in this chapter, you should install Drupal using the Events installation profile. The completed website will look as pictured ...