I've searched around, perhaps in all the wrong places, looking for a simple event list for MT. I'd like my users to be able to submit events consisting of a title, start date, end date, venue, and description. I'm trying to the generate event index and archive pages as well as a widget to show the next N coming events.
I've seen threads discussing abusing the publishing date of an entry as a proxy for an event date along with template hackery to get an upcoming events page. But it just feels wrong and I don't want to disembowel my MT installation to coerce it into supporting this capability.
Perhaps this is really easy and I just need someone to show me the light.
Jim
Reported on Movable Type 4.2
This should be doable with the existing functionality
1) Create an index template that loads only the entries with a tag like "registered_event".
2) Create a new category mapping for a category called "Events" and add all new events as members of that category.
3) Create a widget that pulls down the latest entries that are tagged with the tag you're using to identify events.
Contacts can probably be taken care of via something like MT-Notifier. You can also create a RSS or Atom feed for people to subscribe to that will do the same thing as the archive templates, by just discriminating on entries based on that tag.
I might also add that you can use Custom Fields for this as well - which is free to bloggers in Movable Type Pro. You can create an "events blog" and create custom fields for all of the elements you describe (start and end time, etc).
Is that what you are thinking?
I'm thinking that maybe Jim was looking to do something like what I'm attempting. I'm entering events using the headline as the title of the event and the entry date as the date of the event. I'd the like to build a list of upcoming events for, say, 30 days.
I've tried using the SomeDays and DateTags plugins to list the next 30 days of entries from today, in ascending order, and limiting the total to the next 8 events. I would then schedule a cron job to rebuild the template every night.
Nothing has worked so far. It seems like such a common and simple thing to want to do. Anyone have any ideas?