Using Drupal

Chapter 9. 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 CCK and Views, you can accommodate nearly any variation on event listings for your site.

To follow along with the hands-on example in this chapter, you should install Drupal using the Events install profile. The completed website will look as pictured in Figure 9-1 and at http://events.usingdrupal.com. For more information on using the book’s sample code, see the Preface.

This chapter introduces the following modules:

Date (http://drupal.org/project/date)

Provides a CCK field for entering date information, as well as libraries to handle things like time zone conversion

Calendar (http://drupal.org/project/calendar)

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

Flag (http://drupal.org/project/flag)

A flexible module that enables administrators to add on/off ...