Events Plugin 📆

[Globulle]

Thanks for this awesome plugin! Is there a way to use the iCal link of a private (member only) forum?

[angus (Angus McLeod)]

@Globulle Thanks for trying it out

@Globulle

Is there a way to use the iCal link of a private (member only) forum?

Not at this time. That will require adding and validating an api key in the iCal feed url.

[Globulle]

Is it difficult and/or planned? That would be a powerful tool for my community. Thanks again.

[angus (Angus McLeod)]

It would be a good feature, but tbh it hasn’t been on my radar. I can slot it in about 2-3 months time.

If you need it earlier than that, or with more certainty, you can hire me to do it.

Or if you can gather a few other people who need it, I can bump it up the timetable.

[vitorl]

Thank you <3

I think the UX can be improved a little on the desktop, look at this drop down menu.

vs this one

I see it’s not fully localized to portuguese. I can help you translate everything that is not translated yet. How can I help?

What happens if I uninstall your plugin, but have posts with this active?

Is there a way to set the timer input box to 24 hours cycle? Example: 23:00 instead of 11:00 PM…the latter is more used in certain languages.

[angus (Angus McLeod)]

Hey thanks again for your interest, however you’re using the Discourse Local Dates plugin there, not the Events Plugin. You can test out the Events Plugin on my sandbox: https://discourse.angusmcleod.com.au/c/events.

[vitorl]

You made me confused for a moment, but I’m sure I’m using your plugin? I mean this is all I have in my .yml

hooks:
  after_code:
    - exec:
        cd: $home/plugins
        cmd:
          - git clone https://github.com/discourse/docker_manager.git
          - git clone https://github.com/discourse/discourse-sitemap.git
          - git clone https://github.com/discourse/discourse-solved.git
          - git clone https://github.com/angusmcleod/discourse-locations.git
          - git clone https://github.com/angusmcleod/discourse-events.git

[angus (Angus McLeod)]

The Local Dates plugin is included in Discourse by default. The modal in your screenshot is from that plugin. The Events Plugin modal looks like this

Here’s a guide to the composer UI

[vitorl]

I have translated around 97% of this plugin, except for the stuff I don’t know…

Add a link to the site agenda to the hamburger menu.

What is this supposed to mean? I don’t know what is a “hamburguer menu”.

Let me know and I can finish the translation. After you push it, how I can update my plugin and change the language?

[tobiaseigen]

“hamburger menu” is the menu in the top right corner in the forum that looks like three horizontal lines.

[bletch (Danny Goodall)]

It is so called because the three lines are supposed to represent the three layers of a burger - bun, burger, bun.

I don’t know if that helps with the translation.

[terraboss (Markus)]

I’d like to share some thoughts with you guys:

I absolutely love this plugin.

It solves a lot of issues I’ve previously had by managing lectures and other courses inside Discourse. Discoure is not just great for civil discussions, it also enables me to keep track on knowledge and development cycles. Unfortunately, the events plugin drives me a little bit crazy.

1. There is fear about future updates and dependencies, that won’t might work any longer. It would be so great, if the core dev team of Discourse would integrate this plugin by default. If the day will come and the plugin stops working, I possibly can’t access to the topics any longer. Date and time information, that are extremely relevant, might be no longer available. Especially, if the only workaround to get rid of usability issues, is to disable the plugin.

2. I have a looooot of old events, I’d like to see (in the right order) into the calendar and agenda. But each edit will highlight the old topic at the categories startpage as new / recent activity. This will be very confusing for others to see, if I bring up topics from 2016 and newer. But how can I disable this?

What do you think guys

Should I stop at the very beginning and keep my old schema of topic names with Date and Name of the event or should I risk a full migration of all events, at least the new ones?

For sure, I can work with manual created TOCs and link each topic/event as I do right know. But I really like to see a more secure, reliable future for this incredible plugin.

[MakaryGo (Makary Gołosz)]

There is a built-in action to “reset bump time” for each topic edited
Ed.: it’s built into Discourse core AFAIK:

[angus (Angus McLeod)]

@vitorl

how I can update my plugin and change the language?

Thanks for translating! You can update the events plugin at /admin/upgrade.

@terraboss

There is fear about future updates and dependencies, that won’t might work any longer. It would be so great, if the core dev team of Discourse would integrate this plugin by default. If the day will come and the plugin stops working, I possibly can’t access to the topics any longer. Date and time information, that are extremely relevant, might be no longer available. Especially, if the only workaround to get rid of usability issues, is to disable the plugin.

I understand the concern, but you can’t expect the Discourse team to bring everything into core. There is a fully featured plugin system in Discourse for a reason. I plan to keep supporting this plugin for the foreseeable future.

@terraboss

But each edit will highlight the old topic at the categories startpage as new / recent activity.

There’s a category setting that allows you to suppress it from the homepage.

@terraboss

Should I stop at the very beginning and keep my old schema of topic names with Date and Name of the event or should I risk a full migration of all events, at least the new ones?

It’s up to you mate If you have issues, you can post them here and I’ll help you.

[vitorl]

Well I have no idea how to translate this for my language in a way people would understand lol…

@angus I’m happy to help I just noticed there are some small errors because of the lack of context when translating but now that I see it live, I see that small things can be changed.

That would be like removing a final “.” where it shouldn’t be there, but I can’t do that anymore in transifex? The option to save changes is greyed out?

[tobiaseigen]

@terraboss

But each edit will highlight the old topic at the categories startpage as new / recent activity.

I think the quick edit of topic titles, category, tags etc (pencil link next to title) does not bump the topic. This would be another reason @angus to add event details editing there, as I’ve requested previously.

@terraboss

Should I stop at the very beginning and keep my old schema of topic names with Date and Name of the event or should I risk a full migration of all events, at least the new ones?

I have this same situation and don’t see it as a big deal even if it’s a bit repetitive. I keep the date in the title, in parentheses after the topic title. Example:

@vitorl

Well I have no idea how to translate this for my language in a way people would understand lol…

hehe. not such a big deal, really, since it’s just an admin setting. You could just call it whatever “main menu” is in your language.

[terraboss (Markus)]

@tobiaseigen

I have this same situation and don’t see it as a big deal even if it’s a bit repetitive. I keep the date in the title, in parentheses after the topic title. Example:

Actually, It’s a little bit confusing that the date (and if set, also the time) will be shown in topic title names and while working inside the topic, the short term is disappearing and becomes minimalistic.

There are some events, like course series, that doesn’t change the name at all, except of the date and iteration.

A perfect workaround for me and others, with (dozens of) existing dates inside the topic title, would be some kind of auto-detection method. This functionality should keep the previous date value inside the topic title and automatically add it as event date (without any specific time 00:00).

I guess this would save some of us a lot of time by not changing hundreds of topic names and adding date (and time) values manually. In addition to that, I‘m much more confident about the reliability in case the plugin will eventually stop working in the future. The most important information, the date next to the event name, is there it should be.

[angus (Angus McLeod)]

@terraboss

some kind of auto-detection method

Trying to auto-detect dates folks have entered into titles as raw text is not practical. The permutations of formatting are many and various.

I’m happy to help you out with specific concerns, but I can’t really help with the general concern that the plugin may break one day in some unspecified way.

In a cosmic sense, all things break eventually. All I can say is that I plan to continue supporting this plugin for the foreseeable future.

[AmericanAirlines]

I find this very helpful. Thanks for creating this.

[terraboss (Markus)]

@angus

Trying to auto-detect dates folks have entered into titles as raw text would be impossible. The permutations of formatting are just too many.

As far as I know, there are not so many (most commonly used) permutations …

(YY)YY-MM-DD +
DD-MM-YY(YY) +
(YY)YY-MM-D(D) +
D(D)-MM-YY(YY) +
… and the written word of the month between the day and year.

… with a dot or “-” as separator. And there are existing validation methods out there.

@angus

I’m happy to help you out with specific concerns, but I can’t really help with the general concern that the plugin may break one day in some unspecified way.

I’m glad to hear this. This is very kind and I appreciate this.

@angus

In a cosmic sense, all things break eventually. All I can say is that I plan to continue supporting this plugin for the foreseeable future.

Discourse requires it’s own (at least virtual) server and is very powerful by default. Most of the features are way better than previous stand-alone / plugin LAMP solutions, I’ve tried dozens over the years. Some people might call it the “Eierlegende Wollmilchsau”. For the first time in history we’ve got a open source solution, I would bet, this could work at least the next 10 years. Perfect for knowledge base use-cases …

Over the past years, I’m maintaining my instances in the most reliable way. I guess, most of us experienced broken rebuilds, blank pages and other major issues … at least for a couple of minutes up to several hours. That’s way, I prefer official plugins more than other great plugins, like this one. Events is amazing, but I don’t like to change all of the topic names to have a unified scheme. All of my topic names follow the scheme “DD.MM.YYYY - Name” (sometimes with comma instead of - ).

By the way: There is small usability issue.
I’ve experienced an issue with “long” category and subcategory names with the new tabs “calendar” and “agenda” next to it. The topic buttons on the top right corner creating a line break. Especially on mobile devices. Therefore, I’m also looking for a setting to enable a drop-down menu for both new entries OR by merging both views in one tab. You might know, like the list view of this calender on the top right corner.

What do think?