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cuny-academic-commons / commons-in-a-box

Commons In A Box - A suite of community and collaboration tools for WordPress, designed especially for academic communities
http://commonsinabox.org
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Feature Request: Improve OpenLab Calendar #410

Open beckej13820 opened 2 years ago

beckej13820 commented 2 years ago

I was exploring the "Event Organiser" plugin which is what creates the community Calendar in OpenLab. I think there are a few features available in the current version of the plugin that could be implemented in OpenLab that might make the community calendar feature more popular and usable without a huge development lift.

  1. Allow for upload of featured images for events

The Event Organiser plugin uses a custom post type for its events, and when you install the plugin on a vanilla WordPress installation, the featured image for events still works. Currently in OpenLab, this featured images are disabled, even for admins editing the event an alternative way.

I believe this would require turning on featured images, and then adding a feature image uploader to the calendar item form.

  1. Update template for calendar view to incorporate date picker, all calendar views

The current public User Interface for the Event Calendar is almost the same as the openlab implementation, except that it includes a "Day" view and Calendar date selector

Current Event Organiser interface

Screen Shot 2022-09-15 at 4 23 08 PM

Current OpenLab interface

Screen Shot 2022-09-15 at 4 30 26 PM
  1. Improve the "Upcoming events" view to use featured images, and be filterable

The upcoming events view could be more styled, to utilize the featured images. The image below is an example of community calendar software that SUNY Oneonta pays Campus Labs / Anthology / Blackboard for. This view displays upcoming events, their title, date, featured image, and the organization that sponsored the event.

Screen Shot 2022-09-15 at 4 33 29 PM

Since the events are just a custom post type, this type of view might be possible, and create a visual display of upcoming events.

Here's the current OpenLab Upcoming Events view

Screen Shot 2022-09-15 at 4 44 38 PM

What got me thinking about this is that these changes could be really beneficial to the CUNY SPS team, that are hoping to use OpenLab mostly as a community calendar/club and organization hub to start their implementation.

bree-z commented 1 year ago

Thanks for the suggestion, @beckej13820 ! It's on our radar to consider for a future release.