I’ve been using the Calendar and Events functionality extensively over the past 3 years, across multiple self-hosted Discourse instances. It has been wonderful to see it develop into the impressive suite that it is now.
However, one significant issue continues to stand out for my users.
They struggle to work out how to actually post an event.
This has been consistent the whole time, and across user groups. It remains a problem despite the improvements to the process and modal recently.
The key issue seems to be that the concept of having an event embedded in a post is not familiar nor intuitive for most users. Basically, they need to be able to initiate an event with a single click. The current process:
- Create a new Topic
- Hit the ‘Plus’ button on the Composer bar
- no, not that Plus button, the other one (yes, there are two)
- Hit ‘Create event’
- yes, it is there, you just need to scroll the list down a bit
- Fill in all the details
- once you’ve got there it is pretty good
- Tidy up the mess in the markdown
- if the Event block is adjacent to existing text, it breaks. My users break this all the time.
See the problem?
To mitigate this, I’ve done two things.
This gives:
And I’ve used this New event button to point to a Custom Wizard (using the Custom Wizard Plugin 🧙) which generates the Event block, so that they get the single action they are after. Can share this if anyone is interested.
While this works pretty well for our users, it is limited in functionality and a bit fragile.
It would be much better to have a way for users to jump straight into creating an event (ideally from the /upcoming-events page and/or a nominated Events category) as part of the plugin.