WordPress Calendar Plugins Reviewed

One of the most popular requests most people have for a site driven by WordPress is to have some sort of event calendar where they can let visitors know about upcoming events, meetings, and more. WordPress, unfortunately, doesn’t have this feature built-in, so many people turn to plugins for the answer.

There are plenty of calendar plugins available, and I have used many of them (or at least attempted to) and picked 3 of my favorites.

Calendar

Calendar is a relatively new plugin that was released about a month ago. It is a simple approach to a calendar, removing its data from the Loop and giving you a simple interface for adding events, creating categories, and setting a few options for display, styles, and management. Here are the list of official features from the author Kevin Oshea:

To implement this calendar in your site, all you have to do is create a page and add {CALENDAR}. Save and view the page and your calendar should be there. It seems to be fairly flexible in regards to layout, stretching to fill whatever space you put it in.

If you are looking for a simple, web-based calendar for showing events on your site, this is a great choice.

Event Calendar 3

The Event Calendar plugin (also known as WPCal) works in quite a different way. It uses the default WordPress calendar – the same one that is used to show when posts were made.

After installation, you create or select an existing category to serve as your events category. Every post you make to this category will be used by Event Calendar. It will display your events on a small grid calendar or as a list of upcoming events.

To use this plugin, you have to actually edit your source code to include the call to the php function for the calendar and/or event listing. It also doesn’t show you a full grid calendar. Rather, it shows you a mini-calendar and you mouseover dates with events to view details in a pop-up format. You can also just show a page of all your posts in the events category.

One nice thing about the plugin is that you can subscribe to the events feed via iCal format. It also has some great documentation on using advanced queries and tweaking the template functions.

An advanced implementation of this plugin can be seen on the Birmingham-based website The Terminal in their new Destinations section. They are using this plugin along with some custom fields to allow folks to submit events for approval and add them to the calendar.

So if you are looking for a more advanced implementation of a calendar with Loop integration, this is a great option.

Events Calendar

Not to be confused with Event Calendar, the Events Calendar plugin takes yet another approach to events. It is really a combination of Calendar and Event Calendar 3, giving you options to show a full-grid calendar, a widget with upcoming events, and a small-grid calendar.

In addition to creating an event for the calendar, it gives you the option of creating a post for the event as well. If your theme is Widget-aware, you will get an options panel in the Design > Widgets area for tweaking the sidebar widgets to display as a calendar or a list along with other options.

Fin

So there you have it. Three WordPress event calendar plugins, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. If you have used one that I didn’t cover, let me know about it in the comments and I will take a look at it. It would be nice for the Automattic folks to add an official calendar component to the WordPress package since so many folks are using it as a full-site CMS now, but these plugins fill the gap nicely.

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