One of the first things you have to think about when you prepare to publish a website calendar is how to organize your events. This decision matters because how you organize events behind the scenes affects:
- Your options for presenting the events on your website.
- Your site visitors' options for locating events that interest them.
This topic describes:
How you organize events
The basic unit of organization in the Trumba Connect editing environment is a calendar. Each calendar that you create represents a category. By placing events on a calendar, you categorize them.
For example, you might create calendars that represent:
- Event types (for example, Business and Technology versus Visual Arts)
- Geographical regions or locations.
- Subjects or departments (for example, Mathematics versus Physics).
- Levels (for example, Beginners versus Advanced).
- Other categories that make sense for your events and your site visitors.
Example: Trumba Tribune
In the Trumba Connect editing environment, when you display a calendar that you've created but not yet published, you see the calendar's Current Calendar list. The following picture shows the Current Calendar list for the Trumba Tribune calendar. The bullets on the right describe the thought process behind the calendar categories.
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- We want to publish a comprehensive events calendar on the Trumba Tribune website so we created a top-level calendar called Trumba Tribune.
- Our typical site visitors look for events by type.
- To accommodate this behavior, we created six sub-calendars under the top-level calendar, each representing one event type category.
- Because the six sub-calendars are children of the Trumba Tribune parent, the whole group appears together in one Current Calendar list.
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The relationship between calendars and publications
After you organize your events onto calendars, you can mix the calendars together to form publications. Publications are collections of events that are ready to publish on your website.
For example, in the Trumba Tribune online newspaper, we want to publish two website calendars:
- One comprehensive website calendar on the Events page.
- A more selective website calendar on the Entertainment section home page that includes only events in the Fairs and Festivals, Food and Dining, and Visual Arts categories.
To accomplish this goal, in the Trumba Connect editing environment, we create two separate publications.
Example: Comprehensive Publication
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- To create the comprehensive publication, we publish the Trumba Tribune calendar with all of its sub-calendars mixed in.
- In the editing environment, the Trumba Tribune calendar is now listed as a publication rather than a calendar.
- On the Trumba Tribune website, we embed the publication into the Events page to provide a comprehensive events calendar.
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Example: Entertainment Section Publication
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- To create the Entertainment section publication, we publish the Fairs and Festivals sub-calendar and mix in the Food and Dining, and Visual Arts sub-calendars.
- The top-level Trumba Tribune calendar appears in the Current Publication list as a sort of "foster parent," indicating that the publication's three sub-calendars are, officially, its children.
- On the Trumba Tribune website, we embed the publication into the Entertainment section home page to provide a selective events calendar.
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Because you can mix together different combinations of calendars to form unique publications, you can present the same events in different ways on different pages of your website. For example, on the Trumba Tribune website, we can:
- Customize the appearance of the selective publication so it exactly matches some unique style features in the Entertainment section.
- Choose a rich, detailed display for events in the Entertainment section and a compact, space-saving display for events on the Events page.
- Allow visitors to the main Events page to filter events by region while visitors to the Entertainment page filter events by Audience (such as Adults, Families, etc.).
How event categories affect your site visitors
Each time you create a publication, you also automatically create a collection of Control spuds. Control spuds are widgets that interact with your website calendar to control its state. To learn more about Control spuds, see Make Events Easier to Find.
One of the Control spuds that you automatically create is called a Calendar List spud. When you embed a Calendar List spud on the same page as a website calendar, you give site visitors the option of limiting the events they see by category.
Example: Calendar List spud
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- We created this Calendar List spud automatically when we created the Trumba Tribune comprehensive publication.
- Notice that the event categories in the spud correspond to the category sub-calendars we created in the editing environment.
- Site visitors limit the events they see by clearing and selecting the check boxes to the left of the category names.
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To see a another example of a Calendar List spud, take a look at the New York Times Automotive events calendar. From this spud, we can see that The New York Times chose to organize its automotive events onto calendars that represent geographical regions.
Geographical categories allow auto enthusiasts to limit events to a region where they live or expect to visit.