The Calendar element shows events by day, month or year, as a list or as a mini calendar for a sidebar. Events are typed by hand, come from your articles or from an online calendar, with no calendar extension to install.
Events
One event per line: a title and a start date are enough. The end is optional; on another day, the event shows on each day it covers.
Under the event go up to 5 details, in the order you want: place, online, text, page of the site, website, booking, price, audience, phone, email. The type decides the rendering: a place with its address and a "See on the map" link, a call link, an email link, a link to a page.
The gear of an event opens its settings:
- Colour, in the day, the month, the year, the list and the card;
- All day: only the day shows, not the time;
- Image at the top of the card;
- Event link, as a button on the card, with its text ("Book", "Learn more");
- Repeats: Once, or Every year for dates that come back each year (an annual fair, a flowering). Enter them once, for any year;
- a CSS class.
Repeated sessions
For a show played several times, enter the first session, then use Duplicate this event and change the date. Sessions with the same title recognise each other: the card of each one lists the other dates under "Also on".
Where events come from
On the calendar line, next to its title, Events come from offers three sources:
- From the list below: events typed by hand;
- From category articles: your articles, placed at their date;
- From an online calendar (.ics): a calendar kept elsewhere, read from its address.
Events from your articles
With articles, the list of events gives way to a second line of settings:
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Categories | The published articles of these categories that the visitor may see. The list opens as checkboxes: tick as many as you like. |
| Tags | Optional. Only articles carrying at least one of these tags, for example the calendar of a single town. With categories, the article must be in one of them and carry one of the tags; without a category, all categories count. |
| Article date | Created date, publish date, or date from a Calendar custom field. |
| Start field, end field | The Calendar fields of the articles. An article with no date in the start field is not shown. |
| Place field, address field | Shown like the Place detail of an event; the address adds "See on the map". |
| Fields shown in the card | The other custom fields, with their name and their Joomla rendering. Checkboxes, as for the categories. |
| Blog-style card | The image and intro text of the article in its card, with "Read more". |
| Article dates repeat | Every year: the dates read from the articles come back each year, without redating the articles. |
The same articles can feed a full calendar on one page and a mini calendar in a sidebar.
The filter offered to visitors
With articles, the calendar can offer a Show list above it: visitors keep only the events of one tag (a town, an audience, a theme) or of one category. The month, the list and the cards follow their choice, and the number of events found is announced to screen readers.
Behind the calendar gear:
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Filter offered to visitors | None, by tag or by category. The list only appears when there are at least two choices. |
| Parent tag | Optional. Only its child tags are offered, for example "Member towns" to offer only the towns. |
| Filter label | Empty: "Show". |
Events from an online calendar
Google Calendar, Outlook, Apple, Nextcloud or DPCalendar can publish a calendar under a public iCal address, which often ends in .ics. Opus reads it and shows its events: you keep your calendar where you are used to, and the site follows on its own.
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Calendar address | The public address of the calendar, starting with https:// or webcal://. The site reads it: visitors never contact the calendar provider. |
| Read the calendar again | Every 15 minutes, every hour, every 6 hours or once a day. Between two reads, the site keeps a copy: the page stays fast, and the calendar still shows if the feed stops answering. |
From each event, Opus takes the title, the dates, the place (with "See on the map"), the description and the link. A place that is a web address becomes an "Online" detail.
Recurring events (every week, the first Monday of the month, every year...), dates removed from a series and moved sessions are followed, in the site time. Cancelled events are not shown. The calendar shows events from 1 January of last year up to fifteen months ahead.
If the calendar returns nothing (wrong address, private calendar, no event in these dates), a message explains it on the page, but only to users who can edit modules. Visitors see nothing.
Views
When the display is at the visitor's choice, four buttons switch views:
- Day: the events of one day, with time and place;
- Month: the month grid, two events per cell, then "+2 more";
- Year: the twelve months in small, days with an event marked in their colour;
- List: upcoming events, day after day.
The arrows move by a day, a month or a year depending on the view, and "Today" brings you back.
You can also move between views by clicking:
- in the month, a day number or "+2 more" opens that day;
- in the year, a day opens that day, a month name opens that month;
- in a card, the date ("When") opens the day of that event.
Calendar settings
Behind the calendar gear:
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Display | Day, month, year and list at the visitor's choice, the month or the list alone, or a mini calendar for a sidebar. |
| Starting view | The one the visitor sees on arrival: day, month, year or list. |
| Event card | Right or left: all cards in a frame that scrolls at the calendar height, the next one highlighted. Below: the card of the chosen event. In a pop-up window: the card opens on click. |
| Card width | Out of twelve; the calendar takes the rest. |
| Past events in the list | Removed (the list starts today) or kept. In the month, they stay, greyed out. |
| Add to my calendar | A button on each card: Google Calendar, Outlook, or an .ics file for Apple, Thunderbird and phones. |
| Map link under a place address | OpenStreetMap, Google Maps or none, like the map guidance. |
| Colour and legend | The colour of all events, and the name of each colour under the calendar ("Young audience", "Talk"). A colour without a name does not appear in the legend. |
| Button texts | The text of the "Find out more" link, the "Add to my calendar" button and the "See on the map" link. Empty: the text from the site language. An event's own text comes first. |
| Declare to search engines | Yes by default: each upcoming date is announced to search engines as an event. No for periods that are not events: flowerings, seasons, opening hours. |
Good to know
- Day and month names, and the first day of the week, follow the site language and settings.
- Events typed by hand or read from an online calendar are described for search engines (schema.org structured data): they can appear in results with their date and place. Articles already carry their own. The Declare to search engines setting turns this off.
- The calendar title is required: it names the calendar for a screen reader. Next to the title, Title on screen can hide it, for example when a section heading already precedes it: screen readers still read it.
To go fast
In Choose a layout, the Calendar model places a calendar already filled with examples. The Calendar brick places a calendar on its own, ready to fill in.
Up to date for Opus 1.6.108.