JCal Pro - The Joomla Calendar
For the last two years I've been working with community and faith based groups here in the UK to help them "communicate with their community".
Like most community groups they have events and activities on a regular basis so probably the first extension I've installed on their site has been JCal Pro
, the most complete calendar solution for any Joomla web site.
JCal Pro has an extensive feature set and yet perhaps the most important feature for me is the one used the least.
Many sites use JCal for either its standard calendar layout or for a module of upcoming events. But for me JCal Pro is all about ensuring that event details in the content of my site are always up to date.
It's fine for a calendar to show details of past and future events but here is nothing worse than visiting a website to find a news article about an upcoming event that actually took place several months ago.
Of course this could be handled by effective use of the start and end publishing dates for every content article in Joomla but JCal provides another option.
JCal provides a plugin to insert events directly from the calendar into content articles. By careful use of this plugin you can easily create content articles that only ever show details of upcoming events. And even better your content creator will only have to create the content once, in the calendar.
If you visit:
you will see that each of these pages is actually dynamically created from content in the calendar and the site editor never needs to touch them as they will always be up to date.
[NOTE: these pages are all uncategorised content and the joomla search has been set no to search uncategorised content in order to avoid double hits in the search]
Yesterday JCal Pro reached a stable release for Joomla 1.5. It's been a long road but also a testament to the JCal community and the spirit of open source that a stable release could finally be achieved. There have been many issues along the way, notably the many time zone server configurations, that have all had to be addressed but now that they are development can switch to new features.
During the beta and release candidate stages of JCal's I had to hack together various modifications to make the calendar work the way that I wanted. But I'm really excited that each of these hacks was taken on board by the developers, re-written into better code, and implemented in the stable release so that others can benefit.
Some of the new features planned for JCal Pro 2 may include:
- multiple calendars
- import and export of data
- greater improved handling of repeat events including exceptions
- export the calendar to other applications such as outlook or iphone
- a client/server architecture so that data can be distributed from a JCal Calendar on one site to multiple JCal Calendars on other sites
I'm pretty excited about the last option. Think of the NFL running Joomla and JCal and anyone being able to add NFL fixtures to their calendar automatically and ensure that they are up to date. Or TV Schedules, Band tours, etc.
JCal Pro is the calendar that puts time in your hands.
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