Some questions on customization of Helios Calendar

[Eugen]

Hello everyone,

you got one of the best calendar software out there and I am probably going to buy it, but I got some questions on customization before I hit the paypal pay button

1. As I don't need the categories option in my calendar, is it possible to deactivate it, so it does not show up in event posts or the search?

2. Is it possible to add a column with the city of the event in the main event list? So in the overview you can see the date/time, city, and the title of the event.

3. Is it possible to add a quick search field in the header which is displayed on every page. especially the city option would be useful for me. Of course even better would be one search form/field for every option (title, date, city etc.)

4. Is it possible to group the locations at the location overview by city? So if I got serveral events over different cities, you dont only see the names of the clubs or whatever but also the city/country.

I ask all this questions, as my goal is to create an event calendar publishing events which occur in several countries and cities. The main purpose of this calendar would be that a visitor types in his city and then sees the listing of events in this city with the names of those events and clubs. There's no need that a visitor sees events which happen in another city. I hope you understand what I am trying to say

Thank you in advance for your answers!

Have a nice day
-Eugen

[chris]

1) Categories are a critical component of how Helios Calendar manages events. You could modify the application to not make use of categories, however, by default at least 1 is required.

2) Yes. A set of hacks for adding additional output to the event browse is available here.

3) Yes, you can duplicate & modify the default search form and add it to your public calendar template if you like. You can include the options for users to select their own search settings or you can hardcode all options but keyword to make a "quick search" by making the default inputs hidden.

4) Helios Calendar does not natively support grouping locations, however, you could create secondary navigation (using the "Link to Results" in the event search) to link to preset search criteria including individual cities (this would group all events in the city in the output, achiving the output you describe).

You could very easily achieve that type of functionality by building secondary navigation that allows the user to select their city and then have that link pre-set the public calendar filter. Because filter settings can be saved session to session (via cookies) the user could maintain the filter for return visits.

You can create pre-set filter links within the admin console by selecting the categories and/or cities you are interested in. You could build the navigation using these links and basic HTML or you could automate the task with PHP by selecting the cities from the events table and building the navigation/links with a simple PHP loop. More information about the custom links Helios Calendar supports is available in the documentation here.

I hope this helps answer your questions. Thanks for visiting the forums.

[Eugen]

Thank you a lot for your answers!

I almost forgot about the filter options, but they really do the job. Now I only need to think about some useful categories, but that shouldn't be a big prolem.

Thanks again for your help Chris.