Calendar Feature Request: Smart Fields with Yahoo Upcoming API integration

[gxgEric]

My website focuses around electronic dance music, including electronic dance music events. People from all over the United States visit our website looking for events to attend in their local area.

At this point, we have been using a single forum to list all the events. With the announced forthcoming new features for Calendar, I am considering switching our current forum setup into to calendars. The only way I see this working right now is to create 50 separate calendars, one for each state.

Thinking from the user's point-of-view, who just wants to see events in their area - this does not seem like a very friendly way of presenting events to them. They first have to visit the Calendar page, scrolling through all the calendars to find their state's calendar.

I think a better solution would be to have the user simply click the Calendar tab, and be presented with upcoming events in their immediate area.

In order to do this, we would need to be able to know their current location and know the location of all the events in the calendar. I think the talented IPS developers could easily achieve this by utilizing the extensive venue database of Yahoo's Upcoming API. The user could then set their location within a profile field.

The Upcoming API includes everything you need to allow a user to choose an event's venue and create one on the fly if it is not already in the database. Another option could be checked to bypass this, if it was an online event or some sort of event without a location.

Without getting too technical in this post, I think IPS could easily address my problem with 50 calendars with integration of Yahoo's Upcoming API.


PS: Another benefit would be event syndication through Yahoo's Upcoming website, and all of the websites that feed on their content (Google Search for example)...

[CallieJo]

I have always come across many issues with using more than one calendar in IPB & VB. The major one being how to showcase the correct menu of interest in the easiest manner possible without first going to the first calendar listed.

One of my solutions was to link to each individual calendar inside the forum description shown at the top of each forum. In the past, when using Photopost and other addons, I would link to those specific related categories from those addons as well. The problem with this workaround is that your description gets filled with links. And unless you are inside the forum, you don't see the links.

Another workaround is to create a custom menu including each major category on your site and using drop-downs to include specific areas related to that topic (IE: "topic a" calendar, "topic a" blogs, "topic a" forums, "topic a" photos, etc.). Unfortunately, you cannot utilize the current IPB menu this way. You will have to create a custom one to replace the current one.

The solutions I have used may be difficult for you since you have 50 major categories. I like your idea you presented above.