It’s now much easier to create an events category in your community via the Discourse Calendar and Event plugin. We’ve streamlined the setup process and pulled all the important settings into one place to help you get setup in moments. This is part of the same category setup initiative that brought you easier support categories and ideas categories.
Note: On our hosting, Discourse Calendar and Events is available on the Business plan and above.
In this topic, we’ll review the major changes and share how you can start using this today.
What’s changed
When creating a new category, you’ll now see four types:
When you choose the Events category type, we’ll take care of the basics by enabling the Calendar enabled and Discourse post event enabled settings, and by making sure the category that’s being created is added to the Events calendar categories setting. A few other details to note:
On the General tab, the Category name and Style fields are automatically configured
On the Events tab, you can fine tune the category with controls for default calendar view, which groups can create events, and more. We’ve established defaults here based on what we’ve seen work well in other communities, but you can always change them to fit your use case.
Turning on events type category setup in your community
For now, this is considered an experimental change! We’re welcoming your feedback, which will help us make improvements and roll this out further.
To turn this on, head to the Upcoming changes page in your admin area (/admin/config/upcoming-changes) and find the Enable events category type setup item. Update the Enabled for… field to opt your site in to this new design:
My interpretation of the below was that you’re tweaking/enabling settings to streamline the calendar set-up. I know we preferred the sidebar implementation over the full calendar view.
Oh interesting, I wasn’t aware of this integration with the right sidebar blocks component! Maybe we can do some check to see if the component is installed/enabled and if so turn on the events there? Will have to investigate a bit further.
It certainly would be helpful to be able to easily implement a calendar/upcoming events block in the right sidebar (and the other frameworks).
For that matter, it would be extremely helpful to have a unified upcoming events (i.e. Calendar) AND topic list as the Events category view. I mean something like this (forgive the rough copy/paste):
The current Events category sort, while clever, doesn’t do a great job of making it visibly obvious what actually are the upcoming events. It just looks like a regular topic list with a weird order.
The Yearly View on upcoming-events gets close to this, but only if hacked to hide the expired events. And it is on a completely different page, with navigation to this quite jarring.
In my mind, a combination of the best bits on a single page (as above) would work brilliantly.
I think that with this new update, categories specified as Events Calendar Categories (Calendar and Events > Settings) now default to create event when you’re trying to create a topic. I had categories for which I wanted a calendar at the top, but many of the posts in the category will be just regular topics.
Now to create a topic the user has to “create event” then delete the event from the post, which seems counter-intuitive.
Is there something I’m missing? I’d like to have a calendar that only includes events created in that category on top of a category for which most of the topics don’t have an event.
Yes that was an intentional change. The idea being that if you’re creating an Events category with our new category creation flow that the category would be focused more on events than topics… but perhaps we need a setting that changes that default for cases like yours.
Maybe instead of create event, have a pulldown with create event/create topic. And a setting with the default.
In the meantime I took the calendar off the top of these categories.
Frankly for a subset of the categories, the users found the calendar distracting on their phones anyway, but it’d be great to have a way to see the calendar of events created in the category without always showing it.
What’s changed
Turning on events type category setup in your community
What do you think?