July 23, 2015

HOW TO: Add Events to the Calendar

In TownCMS v5, we have improved how the Calendar of Events works by adding new functionality. This “HOW TO” was put together to help current municipal customers of ours see how it would work when upgrading to v5, and especially for any other town who is thinking of switching to Town Web Design.

In TownCMS v5, we have improved how the Calendar of Events works by adding new functionality. This "HOW TO" was put together to help current municipal customers of ours see how it would work when upgrading to v5, and especially for any other town who is thinking of switching to Town Web Design.

Here are the highlights of the video:

Steps to Add a New Event

  1. When you are logged in and can view the dashboard, click on TWD Events. This is the section where anything related to updating your calendar can take place.
  2. To add a new event, you can click on Add New Event at the top of the screen
  3. Enter an Event Title. This will be the text that displays in the public view.
  4. If you like, you can enter in text for the Description. Usually Clerks will enter some details about the upcoming meeting, such as the venue. Although this is not a required field, anything you enter here will be visible as a pop-up when somebody mouse-overs the Event when viewing the Calendar in public view.
  5. Next you can add the event Start Date and the Start Time. If the event is an all day event, you can checkmark that box. When you select a Start Time for the event, the public view of the calendar will show this time before the Event Title. This way when the public views the events, and where you have multiple events on a specific day, they will be ordered based on the time they start.
  6. If your event is a recurring event, you have a variety of options. Most small towns will have an event occur on a specific ordinal day in the month, such as the 2nd Monday of the Month.

How Recurring Events Work

With the Calendar function you have the ability to select from a wide variety of methods for a recurring/repeating event. Here specific scenarios that work:

Below is a screen shot showing how the Date/Time Selection and the Recurring Events Selection looks in the Admin section. It is quite intuitive to understand an use.

Recurring Event from Admin Section

You Can Edit a Specific Event in a Series

Let us say your town has Garbage Pickup scheduled for Mondays, but in that year the Fourth of July lands on a Monday. Since it is a holiday, the town would not have the pickup scheduled on that Monday, and it would instead be pushed back to a Tuesday. With the Calendar of Events for your Town, you are able to click on the event on July 4th and edit just that specific event. This allows you to move it to a different day without affecting all other days in that series.

Awesome New Feature: Auto-Linked Agenda PDFs

This is an idea that came from feedback from a couple of our municipal customers. They asked for the ability to have the Calendar show a link to a PDF agenda. We therefore set out to sync the site's Meeting Repository (where the minutes and agendas are stored), with the Calendar.You can see in the below screen shot an example of how this looks for one of our municipal customers. Each arrow points to an Agenda PDF that was uploaded through the site's Meeting Repository.

PDF Agendas linked within the Calendar