What do I need to use calendar?

Posted by miasmo on October 24, 2009 at 5:16pm

I would like to create a monthly calendar. I have installed the calendar, date, views, and CCK modules. It is my understanding that the calendar module relies on all of these other modules in some way.

My question is "Which sub-modules do I need to enable?" CCK has nine sub-modules. Should I enable all of them? Which ones are necessary for what I want to do? Also, do I need to enable the Views exporter?

Sorry if this is a dumb question. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Comments

Probably need more info

Posted by matt_harrold on October 24, 2009 at 5:51pm

Probably need more info (you've started with the right ingredients).

What do you want to put on the calendar?

The calendar is only a time based view of content .... what's the content?

BTW: you'll need CCK, Date, Date API, etc ... all those ... whether you need other sub modules depends on the content you want to present on your site.

$0.02 with no refunds.

more info

Posted by miasmo on October 24, 2009 at 6:08pm

Hey,

Thanks for the response.

This is for a band website. I want to be able to display our upcoming gigs in a monthly calendar view as well as having a small box on the front page that shows 2 or 3 or 4 of the soonest gigs in list form.

Also, we frequently play many of the same places over and over, so I would like to be able to select the venue name from a list for that field.

I hope this makes sense. Thanks.

=-=

Posted by VM on October 24, 2009 at 6:24pm

calendar.module comes with a view that can be cloned that provides the calendar and blocks you need.

venues from a drop down will likely require a venue content type and a node reference.
Another method may be to use taxonomy to do so.

VeryMisunderstood is actually

Posted by matt_harrold on October 24, 2009 at 8:01pm

VeryMisunderstood is actually seldom misunderstood ... what she/he said.

Node reference and a custom content type for (repeating) gig venues is a good idea. Much more flexible than a taxonomy of venue terms.

If you start to bang it out .... it will start to take shape and make sense.

$0.02 with no refunds.

Thanks

Posted by miasmo on November 5, 2009 at 9:08pm

I ended up getting something to work. I created a field called venue for the content type "date." I would eventually like to have the city as a field and have it be associated with the venue field. Perhaps I need to create a venue content type like you suggested. I hope there is some way to have instances of the venue content type be available as drop down menu choices for the venue field for the date type and bring along the city info as another field for "date." I'll have to monkey around with it after I make a little more progress on my Zen subtheme css.

Thanks for your help!

If you create a content type

Posted by matt_harrold on November 6, 2009 at 5:35am

If you create a content type called Venue, you can either add your own City field or use the Location module to give the venues full addresses, phone, fax, and lat/long for a Google map. Then in your Date content type, create a Node Refererence CCK field called field_venue, in the options ... use a "select list", you'll get a drop down list of venues (rather than typing).

Just a quick idea ... if you install the auto_nodetitle module, you could set it up to automatically fill in the gig title with the Venue name. This means adding a new gig (at an existing venue) would be as easy as selecting a date, selecting a venue, and hitting the submit button.

Other modules that could help are prepopulate, and noderefcreate ... but I don't want to overload you with too much. Good luck.

$0.02 with no refunds.

Thanks!

Posted by miasmo on November 7, 2009 at 4:27pm

Much thanks for all the great info!

confusion on fields, views, etc.

Posted by miasmo on December 8, 2009 at 8:21pm

Matt,

Thanks for your suggestions. They were very helpful.

I am now having a problem that I can't seem to figure out. I have created two fields for the content type "venue" that I created: "smoking" and "all ages." I would like for the monthly calendar view (and all calendar views for that matter) to pull these values from "venue" and display them for any shows that are non-smoking and/or all ages.

Also, the Location module seems to have its own system for displaying its fields that is not integrated with CCK and Views, which is complicating things.

I would think that since Calendar uses Dates which reference a specific Venue, that I could somehow pick which venue-specific fields to pull into the Calendar display, but I have just been spinning my wheels trying to figure this out. Any suggestions as to what I might be missing here???

=-=

Posted by VM on December 8, 2009 at 8:44pm

you can add any fields you want to the view. cck fields are listed under the content selection in the dropdown.

to use location information in your view, investigat relationships. There is a thread on this in the location.module issue queue. Personally, I use the venues on my events as a nodereference. doing so allows me to have a venue content type with my location information then in my event content type I reference this venue in a dropdown.

Now it does create a 2 step process, venues must be entered manually however, they only have to be entered once and are then able to be used multiple times. Rather than the alternative which is to manually type in the venue every time an event is setup even if the venue has been used in the past.

"venues on my events as a nodereference"

Posted by miasmo on December 8, 2009 at 10:05pm

Thanks for the reply!

Personally, I use the venues on my events as a nodereference. doing so allows me to have a venue content type with my location information then in my event content type I reference this venue in a dropdown.

Now it does create a 2 step process, venues must be entered manually however, they only have to be entered once and are then able to be used multiple times. Rather than the alternative which is to manually type in the venue every time an event is setup even if the venue has been used in the past.

That is exactly what I did.

you can add any fields you want to the view. cck fields are listed under the content selection in the dropdown.

I'm pretty sure I did that too, and the info did not show up. I will retrace my steps and see if I missed something.

to use location information in your view, investigat relationships. There is a thread on this in the location.module issue queue.

I will definitely check out that thread, because I do not have a good grasp on relationships. I am not a programmer and some of these logical concepts are not intuitive to me.

Thanks for your help. I will dig back into this and probably be back with more questions.

=-=

Posted by VM on December 8, 2009 at 10:18pm

if the fields that aren't showing up are location fields. The lack of a relationship is likely the issue. Took me a but of fiddling around with them, especially after I set up a nodereference. Location.module is undermaintained in some ways and I recall spending an hour or two in the issue queue working through threads and patches in order to get locative info pulled correctly.

video about calendar

Posted by Stoob on March 29, 2010 at 4:06am

This is a super fast video how to install and use Calendar module for D6.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_sAQn-ZfFE

CiviCRM specialist