pre sales questions

[Andrew]

Hi guys,  your products and support look to be rock solid so I’m really hoping I can get your events calendar to work for my site.

For now I have some inquiries about features and some misc. questions…

Features:

1. Featured (sponsored) Events.  I plan on building a robust community events calendar for my county.  I would love to be able to monetize the calendar by allowing event organizers to purchase sponsored event placement.  These events would be placed above all other events in each view and would be styled to stand out from standard events.  I would like to give organizers the ability to purchase sponsored placement both when entering their own events as well as the ability to upgrade any of their events which already exist on the site.

Would you have a rough idea of the scope of work involved with something like this should I decide to bring in an experienced developer to assist?  Would we be talking days or weeks to implement?  Also, is this functionality in your roadmap?

2. Import options other than csv.  I’m going to be dealing with hundreds of event listings from dozens of venues so naturally I would like to automate as much of the process as possible.  I played with time.ly and I liked their automatic import from Google calendars and ical.  Is anything along those lines in the works for TEC?

Misc. Questions:

1. If I use the community events add on, can event organizers claim and edit their events if they were initially created by an admin?

2.  If event details change after the initial event publication will the altered details be updated in the calendar if I re-import through Facebook event imports and/or csv imports?

3. I found some detailed documentation on your site about setting the plugin up to work on Genesis but it appeared to reference a previous version of the plugin.  Is the calendar plug and play with Genesis, or are there specific steps that need to be taken to get it to work?

For what it’s worth, I’ve found some other products that contain all the features I’m looking for but none seem to come close to you guys in terms of documentation and support.  That goes a long way in my book so I’m hoping I can build on any features that may be missing for my specific needs.  Thanks!

[Casey D]

Hello Andrew,

Thanks for contacting us, you ask some great questions!

Unfortunately the short answer for each seems to be “no or kinda” for each.

If you have a moment, we’d love for you to submit your ideas to our UserVoice forum. We take user ideas and contributions very seriously, and many times their ideas end up in our future releases.

Here are more detailed explanations:

Featured Events

I plan on building a robust community events calendar for my county.  I would love to be able to monetize the calendar by allowing event organizers to purchase sponsored event placement.  These events would be placed above all other events in each view and would be styled to stand out from standard events.  I would like to give organizers the ability to purchase sponsored placement both when entering their own events as well as the ability to upgrade any of their events which already exist on the site.Would you have a rough idea of the scope of work involved with something like this should I decide to bring in an experienced developer to assist?  Would we be talking days or weeks to implement?  Also, is this functionality in your roadmap?

There is no functionality like this built in. There is a ‘make sticky’ option, but that only keeps it above the cut off on month view, when there are more events than space.

This seems like it would be a highly requested feature, and an outside dev might be able to create a premium plugin. I’m not really sure on the timeline, though. I’m sure a minimum functional plugin could be made in a week or two, higher quality would take more.

Import options

 I’m going to be dealing with hundreds of event listings from dozens of venues so naturally I would like to automate as much of the process as possible.  I played with time.ly and I liked their automatic import from Google calendars and ical.  Is anything along those lines in the works for TEC?

There is no way to import from Google Calendars or iCal yet, especially automatic. It’s all data though, so having a dev write a converter is relatively low hanging fruit. From a quick search there seems to be many ics -> csv converters online.

Claim event

If I use the community events add on, can event organizers claim and edit their events if they were initially created by an admin?

“Yes, kinda”. The user must have an account, with at least a role of ‘author’ or higher to edit. They cannot ‘claim’ events, but previously made events can be assigned to them by the owner. The new owner cannot see all events unless they are ‘editor’ though, but then they can change the data/authorship on every event.

I’m sure if a workflow was decided on, it would be relatively easy for a developer to create a plugin for users to ‘claim’ events.

Re import alterations

If event details change after the initial event publication will the altered details be updated in the calendar if I re-import through Facebook event imports and/or csv imports?

As far as I can tell, when data is re-imported through csv, the event is duplicated not overwritten. For Facebook, I believe the information is updated for automatic import, but overwritten for manual import. Basically if you are manually inserting data, it will always create a new event. All edits must go through the edit screen.

Genesis Support

 I found some detailed documentation on your site about setting the plugin up to work on Genesis but it appeared to reference a previous version of the plugin.  Is the calendar plug and play with Genesis, or are there specific steps that need to be taken to get it to work?

We currently don’t offer Genesis support, as there are known conflicts.

Does this make sense? Let me know if I can explain anything else!

Cheers!

– Casey Driscoll

[Andrew]

Casey,

Thank you for the detailed reply! It’s support like this that really makes me want to use your products.

I wasn’t too surprised by any of the answers, except for the bit about Genesis. I’m pretty locked in to using Genesis and wouldn’t want to switch. Would the suggested route be to install your calendar on a subdomain using a different theme?

I’m going to have a look around at other solutions, but I really appreciate the info.

[Barry]

I’ll go ahead and close this thread as it’s been quite a while – but of course if we can help with anything else just open a new thread and let us know!

[Author]

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