Adding several events as one operation

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GrahamO's picture

I am in the process of revising our church website from D6 to D7, almost certainly using OpenChurch. In the D6 version I have used a custom-PHP way of adding the events for each week because the normal Drupal way of adding one event at a time is too cumbersome and would not be acceptable in our church office.

I have found previous posts about this and a D6 module called 'Multi Node Add'. Does anyone know of a D7 module or proposal that might help? I only need one targetted at adding a set of events (perhaps 10 at a time) adding initial content to 'title' and 'when' fields.

If there is nothing available I might have a go at producing something.

Comments

Adding several events..See Feeds

OneTallShort's picture

Graham,

Take a look at http://drupal.org/project/feeds Not sure if it has a event tie in or what you're using for a calendar, but it's pretty flexible and you can write handlers against it. I know Commerce uses it for product imports...at 31,811 sites using it, it's got some momentum!

Re: Adding several events as one operation

gr8britton's picture

A bulk event import would be a great feature. When you decide how you are going to do it in D7, can you post it as a module?

Field Collection Module

jsheffers's picture

This is already attainable in D7. Use the field collection module which allows you to setup a repeatable section with multiple fields. So you could essentially have a date field, description or any other custom fields in the field collection. This gives you multiple event's all inside one node.

http://drupal.org/project/field_collection

You can even include taxonomy to tag each event in a special category.

Feeds is definitely one

drupalninja99's picture

Feeds is definitely one option. It's also not a bad idea to use google calendar or some other type of 3rd party calendar that can interact with multiple systems. See this church site I set up uses google calendar: http://harpethhills.org/events/calendar

Someone mentioned integration with Planning Center Online the other day which has events. I noticed here: http://help.planningcenteronline.com/m/planning-center/l/49312 - that they allow you to push to google calendar.

So if we create a way to push OC events to google calendar and use the google calendar for the event calendar then we'd have something. I am not sure how easy or hard it is to push events to google. Any ideas? I wonder if the calendar module has information ab pushing events to gcal.

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Have you tried FullCalendar?

bjlewis2's picture

I'm pretty sure that the FullCalendar module has Google integration. If I remember correctly it can pull from a google calendar, and you can set a feed to push events created on your site to a Google calendar.

(IMHO, FullCalendar is a lot easier to use than the calendar module, and looks better too.)

Tim Plunkett is always on irc and super helpful! So if you want to look into it, I'd suggest getting ahold of him on irc.

If you look closely enough,

Code Monkey's picture

If you look closely enough, that help page from planningcenteronline.com shows an actual ical url. You do not need to get it into Google Calendar before importing it into your Drupal install.

The downside is, the iCal parser for Feeds is still being worked on for D7.

Wow I did not know ab

drupalninja99's picture

Wow I did not know ab FullCalendar, it looks great. It is already whitelisted so I can include the library in my .make. I think that is our solution - I saw the google calendar integration here: http://drupal.org/node/1237774

That sounds perfect to me. I will add that to the 1.11 roadmap - http://drupal.org/node/1489956

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Adding the events

GrahamO's picture

Thank you for all the comments and suggestions.

I hope to try out FullCalendar but cannot manage to set up a calendar with the current Beta 3 release.

To get back to my original requirement, I feel the need for a form that can be used daily or perhaps weekly in our church office to enter several events and their dates into the calendar in one operation. The normal method of adding one event at a time is slow and unattractive to the users and I don't want them to be put off the 'new Drupal system'.

I prefer to keep the calendar and events within Drupal rather than use Google because it enables me to create views of, for example, what is happening this week.

I shall keep looking.

Well another idea is to have

drupalninja99's picture

Well another idea is to have an option where we you have a configuration page that accepts an RSS feed or some kind of feed, like from google maybe. And then it auto-imports events from the feed. This would be using the feeds module. We could have a submodule in openchurch or something that does this for the administrator so all they have to do is grab the google calendar .xml or whatever and point to it from Openchurch.

FullCalendar let's you integrate a google calendar feed with it's calendar but obviously it does 'import' anything into Drupal. So my option would be one that also imports those events as nodes in Openchurch.

I don't know if it needs to be RSS which is more universal or if I need to take a look at google's xml feed. I would be curious if their xml feed is some kind of standard or only something that google uses.

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Looking at google calendar's

drupalninja99's picture

Looking at google calendar's xml, it is pretty straight-forward. So if I created a sub-module for feeds that creates a feed you just enable and point to the google calendar xml url, then that would be an alternative to using FullCalendar's google option, since you would no longer need this in theory. You would only use that option if you wanting to integrate events from other google calendars but not have them live as Drupal event nodes, which would seem to me to be confusing.

I haven't ever tried to create a module that hooks into feeds so I could see how that works. I don't know if Feeds creates exportables? That would be interesting.

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Who does the data entry?

GrahamO's picture

Are you presupposing that the data is in google calendar?

I am envisaging our normal office situation where someone currently types the data into their PC each week. At the moment it goes into a leaflet for printing, not in to a database or a shared calendar

I haven't looked at how one can enter multiple events into google calendar but I would prefer to put them directly in to Drupal. Perhaps google calendar has the input feature I am wanting? I will take a look.

Ya my point is that google

drupalninja99's picture

Ya my point is that google calendar is really easy so as far as inputting a lot of events that would be a good option. Plus the fact that google calendar integrates well with other systems that push events. Someone was mentioned integrating with http://planningcenteronline.com for example. Well planning center can push to google calendar and we could create a way to push google calendar events back to Drupal.

I don't know of any multi node add type of modules for Drupal 7.

Follow me on twitter: @drupalninja

I played around with a feed

drupalninja99's picture

I played around with a feed importer from google calendar and it didn't work so great. That is because the google XML doesn't include the start/end dates in a machine readable field which is unfortunate bc that is the most important data.

Follow me on twitter: @drupalninja

Calendar module

arboldeolivo's picture

I prefer the Calendar module, and its repeat feature might be what you're looking for. There's an option to set an all day event. And you can use just a start date, or combine both a start date and end date. You can enter the date settings with a calendar pop-up, which is really fast, or the rolodex type.

The front page block works nice also for upcoming current events. And you can view it by the day, week, month, or year.

I do not use the repeat feature, so you'd have to test it out to see if it works for you. I am very pleased with everything else though.

I also like Google's calendar, but I didn't like that it was outside of my website domain.

arboldeolivo
Olive Tree Web Design
Web Design in San Diego

Calendar module repeat feature

GrahamO's picture

I have used this in the past as a D6 version and no doubt it is better now. I like Calendar and, like you, I prefer it to Google Calendar because it keeps alll records within my domain.

I used to use the repeat feature and it certainly helped get those events in to the system.

Nevertheless, I still think a module for entering multiple events at a time would help us, perhaps because our broadband service slows down in the afternoon when the kids get home from school!

Would also be interested

MrPeanut's picture

I would also be interested in this feature. We have multiple users, each with their own Google Calendar. They prefer using Google Calendar for everything because they can input events in Outlook (which syncs with Google Calendar) or with their mobile phone, all sync with Google Calendar.

However, from there, I need those events as nodes on Drupal. Reason being I want to create a view of upcoming events for the week. I'll then use Rules to send that out weekly. This way people don't have to get online and check, it comes to them.

drupalninja99 — Sounds like you have the right idea and are on the right track. Hope something is able to develop out of all this.

Between Date iCal and iCal Parser, I was hoping to get some resolution, but alas, not yet.

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